


Expectant Management

by saintroux



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2018-2019 NHL Season, Angst with a Happy Ending, Boning for the Greater Good, Domesticity, Family Feels, Friends to Lovers, Impregnation, Male Fertility Issues, Multi, Sperm Donation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:27:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22703938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintroux/pseuds/saintroux
Summary: And there it was: the question that Zhenya had been hoping no one would ask. He and Anya had both been pretty excited about trying again last winter, but by the time August had rolled around they were knee-deep in doctor’s appointments. Just before their flight back to Pittsburgh, Zhenya had been delivered the final blow: low sperm count.
Relationships: Anna Kasterova/Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby/Anna Kasterova/Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Comments: 16
Kudos: 270
Collections: Sid/Geno/Anna Exchange: Round 2





	Expectant Management

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pinetreelady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinetreelady/gifts).



> for pinetreelady! i had an idea in mind when i started this, and was thankful that it hit RIGHT upon some of your listed likes! i hope this full of enough juicy angst, happy endings, and domesticity porn to make your day! thanks to s for the beta and the fact checking and reminding me that it wasn't just a bunch of muck. <3

“I think the power play was looking pretty good yesterday,” Sid said, spearing another shiny potato wedge with his fork. “You think so? Good movement, decent entry. Phil’s got a fucking _rocket_ of a shot, eh? I barely saw that thing.” 

Zhenya finished chewing his bite of salad, licking a bit of dressing from his lips. “Looks good,” he agreed, and leaned back far enough in his chair that the metal creaked. “Maybe more puck for me next time.” He grinned at Sid across the small table. His and Sid’s annual pre-season dinner date was one of Zhenya’s favorite and their most long-lasting traditions: the two of them at any one of the five restaurants that Sid liked, sharing a dessert and a few drinks, a welcome respite before the grind of a long season. 

Sid laughed, predictably impressed with Zhenya’s jokes as always. “You gonna score if I put it on your tape, eh?” 

“I score for sure,” Zhenya said. “Hat trick. Every game.” 

The place they had come to this year was some pseudo-fancy American place in a small brick building tucked away on Beaver Street, a similar distance from both Zhenya and Sid’s homes. It was easy for Zhenya to talk himself into another glass of wine when he knew his bed was a mere five minutes’ drive away, and even easier because he needed the distraction from encroaching thoughts of Anya and all the doctor’s appointments and that whole _mess_. 

“You gonna give me a sip of that?” Sid asked, hand already reaching for Zhenya’s glass mere seconds after the waitress had set it down. He had this weird habit of filching a sip of Zhenya’s drink pretty much every time they went out, no matter how many times he pursed his mouth after. At this point, Zhenya wasn’t sure if Sid was doing it just to fuck with him. “Hmm, that’s sweet.” 

“I tell you,” Zhenya said, and took his own sip, savoring the warm slide of it down his throat. 

“Oh,” Sid prodded, leaning his elbows on the table, his rum and Coke dangling from one hand. “You were gonna show me that video of Nikita shooting on you, right?” Zhenya had mentioned it at the rink a few days ago: the mini stick set his parents had bought, and how Nikita’s new favorite game was to slide around the playroom smacking them against the floor, mimicking Zhenya’s movements in his clumsy baby way. It was pretty fucking cute. 

Zhenya brought it up on his phone and turned the volume to low and passed it to Sid who held it between them, the both of them watching Nikita get a head of steam and dive to shoot one of the wiffle balls right between Zhenya’s spread legs. In the background, Anna was laughing. Zhenya, like every good father, hadn’t even tried to stop it. 

“Like father like son,” Sid said as he passed the phone back to Zhenya. “You guys thinking of having more? They could start a mites team.” 

And there it was: the question that Zhenya had been hoping no one would ask. He and Anya had both been pretty excited about trying again last winter, but by the time August had rolled around they were knee-deep in doctor’s appointments. Just before their flight back to Pittsburgh, Zhenya had been delivered the final blow: low sperm count. And he hadn’t told _anyone_ yet, but as Sid kept prattling on about this ingenious five-man-unit of Zhenya’s offspring idea he had cooked up, Zhenya couldn’t keep it in. 

“No, it’s like—we can’t,” Zhenya interrupted, just as Sid was musing about whether Nikita might be a forward or a defenseman. Definitely a forward, if Zhenya had any say. 

“Oh, well—it’s probably pretty impractical to have five kids, like. When do you have the time, you know?” Sid laughed and raised his shoulder like he had any earthly idea. There was no denying that Sid was a top-notch babysitter, but being an uncle was nothing at all like being a parent. 

“No, Sid, I—” Zhenya felt like he was choking on food that wasn’t even in his throat. Why was it so fucking hard to tell someone? Fuck. He felt so—it was stupid to get worked up about this, but he couldn’t help it. All the guilt festering inside from the months and months he’d spent snapping at Anya about the _process_ and all the increasingly outlandish things she was suggesting might help. Surely it wasn’t Zhenya’s problem to solve—except how it definitely, absolutely _was_ and he had spent the better part of the year being a massive dick. He had been trying to make up for it lately by following her instructions to the letter: he cut out a couple nights’ worth of red meat, he added one more day a week to his training regimen. “I can’t—I don’t have like.” He wasn’t even really sure what the word for it was in English. 

Sid was looking at him with that tenderly concerned brow, hands clasped over his glass. Zhenya downed the rest of his wine and lowered his voice to barely a whisper. “My stuff’s no good, you know?” The admission felt like a heavy weight on his head, and he watched the wheels turn as recognition slowly dawned on Sid’s face. 

“Oh,” Sid said, measured and calm, full of friendly concern. “I’m sorry man, that—that sucks.” His warm hand settled on Zhenya’s knee, his lips folded inward. Somber. Pitying. 

Zhenya didn’t want to be pitied. He wanted to not have to deal with this at all. “Maybe it’s sign, I don’t know.” He shrugged, trying to make light of it. “Just one kid for me, I make sure he turns out best.” 

“I mean it’s not like that has to be—you guys could always adopt, or like, get someone’s frozen sperm or whatever,” Sid said, like this was a perfectly normal conversation to be having at half past six in a public courtyard. It was almost funny. “You could always ask like Max or someone if you wanted to know them.” He kept on and on, ever the font of helpful advice like the neighborhood busybody that he was. “Hey, even me. Not like my guys are getting any use anywhere else, anyway.” 

Zhenya nearly spit out his drink, and was still coughing dramatically about it when Sid added, “Oh, I didn’t mean like—I don’t need to come over and like _do_ it. But how hard can it be to jerk it into a cup, eh? For a good cause?” He could see Sid trying to keep things light and decided to play along instead of thinking about any of the ways that Sid could _come over_ and _do it_. Jesus. There was a reason that Zhenya had kept things hush-hush. 

Zhenya laughed and nearly crossed himself in thanks when the waitress came around the corner to clear their plates and offer up the dessert menu. “No dessert?” Zhenya teased, as Sid politely declined. “You okay? Sick?” 

“You know Andy is gonna chew my ass if I show up over weight tomorrow,” Sid said, and Zhenya let the conversation turn naturally to more usual things: hockey and their summer exploits, Zhenya’s warm weather vacations, Sid’s endless rounds of golf. 

Zhenya didn’t think at all about his frustrating fertility problems or Sid’s kind offer of assistance until they were walking to their cars and Sid put his hand on Zhenya’s arm. 

“I’m serious about helping out, G,” he said, looking up at Zhenya with such earnest eyes. “Maybe it’s good—if the kid can’t have your hockey genes, might as well get the next best thing.” He gave half a wink and nudged at Zhenya companionably. Easy as anything. “Or if you just wanna talk or whatever, like. I’m here.” 

Zhenya could think of about ten thousand things to say, but only one came out. “Thanks,” he said, forcing a smile and scuffing his shoes against the sidewalk until they came to the intersection and parted ways. 

Probably Zhenya could figure it out without him—or anyone else. He and Anya hadn’t had any issues the first time around, and maybe that had been a fluke, but luck could happen twice, maybe, if they wanted it hard enough.

///

The excitement of the start of a new season kept Zhenya largely occupied until he woke up one morning and heard Anya cursing under her breath in the washroom, audible even over the sound of the running tap.

“Jerry?” he called, hoisting himself up from bed. She was sitting on the vanity counter in her sleep shorts, hair a puffy nest atop her head, nipples pebbled through her tank top. When she looked up, her eyes were pink and shiny with tears. 

“Fuck, sorry, sorry,” she said, hopping down from the counter and frantically scrubbing her hands over her face and running them under the water, trying to hide any signs of her distress. “Go back to sleep, it’s fine.” 

“Shh,” Zhenya soothed, gathering her up in his arms, both of them pressed against the cool stone counter. He reached around her to turn off the sink. “Hey. Jerry.” 

It took her a while to settle, and Zhenya waited there, stroking her sides and kissing the rat’s nest at the back of her hair. Eventually, the sound of her wet breaths stopped and she made eye contact with Zhenya through the mirror. He didn’t think that he was very good at handling Anya when she was upset; he tried too hard to predict what she might say, and mostly felt confused about her hardened facade. She didn’t like to cry much, but when she did, Zhenya had mostly learned to hold her. And wait. 

“You wanna talk about it?” he asked her, tucking hair behind her ear where it had fallen into her eyes. “I have to leave for the rink soon, but no one is surprised if I’m late, really.” 

She crawled out from his grasp and Zhenya thought that that might mean ‘no,’ but then she slumped down on the closed lid of the toilet and sighed. “It’s stupid,” she said to her hands. Zhenya squatted down on the tile in front of her. “My period came again. I don’t know. Fuck.” 

“Oh, well.” Zhenya put a hand on her wobbling knee, saying the words he thought felt best. “I’m sorry. Try again next month?” 

But Anya wasn’t convinced. “Maybe we should give it a break, I don’t know. There’s nothing—it’s not like it’s suddenly just going to work again, the doctor said—“

“I know what the doctor said.” Now Zhenya felt like he was getting just as worked up. He rubbed his hands through his hair and crawled closer to Anya, trying to think about what _she_ needed, and not what might make him feel better. He chucked a hand under her chin. “Listen, I,” he said. “I told Sid about—about the issues I’m having.” It still felt weird to say aloud, like he was less a man. 

Anya cocked a brow at him. “Oh? Well I’m glad, Zhenya. You shouldn’t stay so quiet about things, just leave them all bottled up inside.” She reached a hand out and ran it along his cheek, fond and warm. They were both such messes about it, trying to make another baby, but it was nice to be messes together. 

“He offered to help,” Zhenya said. 

“Help how?” Anya laughed softly, her throat still rough from crying. “I know you think the world of him, but I don’t think being good at hockey translates to any sort of expertise in fertility issues. If only.” 

“Well he actually,” Zhenya cupped his hand around Anya’s own on his cheek, grounding himself. “He offered to donate his, well—he offered to be a donor for us.” 

“And you would be okay with that? I thought you said there was no way you would—” Anya asked. 

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know if he was serious.” Zhenya still wasn’t keen on the idea, to be honest, not from Sid or Max, his brother, _anyone_ , but any of it was preferable to the dejected look on Anya’s face each month, the frustration of endless waiting. 

“Well, maybe.” Anya chose her words carefully. “I don’t want it to be like this, Zhenya, I wish it was—I wish it was easier. Simpler. And I’m not sure if I’m truly sold on the idea of it: someone else’s child. But maybe it’s—maybe we can talk about it, okay? Maybe it’s worth a try.” 

She leant forward to kiss him then, her mouth swollen and a little damp from tears. Zhenya wanted to lose himself in it, their little bubble, and he kissed her long and slow until the baby monitor started chirping on the counter and Anya pulled back. “Better go check on Nikit, before that little bear starts knocking himself out of his bed.” She stood to go but turned around in the doorway. “Good luck tomorrow night. Talk when you get back, okay?” 

“Love you, Jerry,” Zhenya said, pulling her in for another kiss, pressing their bodies close. 

Zhenya finished getting ready for practice alone, and on the drive to the rink he thought about it: letting Sid help them out, Sid the surrogate _father_ to one of Zhenya’s children. What would the media say, if it got out? Malkin: second fiddle to Crosby on the ice and off. What would Zhenya’s parents think? 

To say nothing of any of Zhenya’s personal feelings on the matter. He hadn’t lied when he had told Anya he was unsure about it, but perhaps with someone else he may have been less so. Sid had grown into arguably one of Zhenya’s best and most reliable friends, practically family, but it didn’t take too much effort to remember his own embarrassing hero-worship crush on Sid their first couple of years in the league. Maybe it would be too weird. 

But a lot of life had happened since then, and Anya wanted him to consider it. So he would.

///

Zhenya went to Montreal with the team and got dinner with some of the old guys: Tanger and Phil, Horny, Sid. The lights in the restaurant were turned down low and Zhenya ate his salmon and watched Sid laughing across the table: affable and friendly, sipping his wine and holding court. When they were younger, Zhenya had imagined that someday his and Sid’s children would grow up together, playing in the lounge at the rink, learning to skate. But the woman that Zhenya had thought Sid might marry hadn’t worked out, and he had been mostly single in the years since, happily babysitting everyone’s kids by day, and dutifully parenting his team each night.

He would be a good father, Zhenya thought. Kind and attentive. He certainly raised his voice with much less frequency than Zhenya ever had. He was warm and steady, and loved to laugh at even the worst, most pitiful jokes. 

But he wouldn’t be a father, if he helped Zhenya and Anya. He would be—a donor, technically. And Uncle Sid to whomever the child was, just as he had been to Nikita for the past two years. And maybe Sid was okay with that, being an uncle for the rest of his life. 

Zhenya couldn’t imagine it. It sounded lonely. Nothing had been better than the thought of coming home to his own little family each time the team plane touched down. 

They lost their game the next night in the shootout, and as Zhenya was walking to the bus that would take them to the airport, Anya sent him a text: _sorry for the loss, my champ. see if sid wants to come for dinner on monday?_

Zhenya’s heartbeat raced. He wasn’t certain that he had made his decision, but it seemed that Anya had. When he stepped on the bus, Sid was already in his seat, tucked in against the window with his hat pulled low, his face a somber line in the dark. 

Zhenya slid in beside him. “Hi, Sid.” 

“Oh, uh—what’s up?” Sid turned his attention from the empty loading docks and pushed his hat up his forehead a little. “Loss got you changing up your seat routine?” He smiled a little at Zhenya and nodded to his seat across the way, which was still empty without his person in it as it had been for the past twelve years. 

“No, I don’t change,” he replied, and took his briefcase from his lap and tossed it over the aisle into his seat so none of the rookies would get any funny ideas, nearly hitting Horny in the face with it in the process. 

“Watch it, G!” Horny said, dodging past on his way to the back of the bus. 

Zhenya snickered. “You watch!” And then turned back to Sid and smiled a big winning smile, seeing amusement reflected in Sid’s face the way it always was. “You free Monday? Anya asks if you want dinner.” 

“I was gonna grab some groceries after practice,” Sid said, and pulled his phone out to flip through his calendar, which was filled with more notifications than Zhenya wanted to contemplate. “But probably I could swing by. I told you you didn’t owe me anything for dinner the other night.” 

“I uh—” Zhenya began, lowering his voice again. Grown men were stupidly nosy. “I tell her, other day. About you offer? Help with uh, baby. I think she want talk about.” 

“Oh!” Sid seemed a bit surprised, but he opened a new page on his phone and quickly started typing. “Yeah, sure. What time? Need to set myself an alarm so I don’t forget, but—definitely.” 

After Zhenya returned to his own seat, he put his cheek against the window to feel the cool sting of the glass, letting his mind drift a little as the lights of Old Montreal passed them by and they crossed over the river and on towards the airport. As much as he was still a bit unconvinced about how it might work out between them, a part of Zhenya was glad that Sid hadn’t been kidding. It was already embarrassing to ask another man to help you father your own child, even one that he had known as long and as well as Sid. But perhaps he wouldn’t have survived it, if Sid had laughed it off today and said no. 

As they rolled along the dark expanse of highway, Zhenya put his headphones in and pulled his toque down over his brow and sent to Anya: _sid says okay. see you soon, jerry. <3_ and then he closed his eyes and let exhaustion take him.

///

Sid arrived at their house on Monday ten minutes before Zhenya had told him to be there, bottle of wine and a plastic grocery bag in his grip.

“Dessert,” he said, handing it over, face tinted with the polite nervousness of a boy going on his first real date. He had his nice pants on: jeans so dark they were nearly black, and a crisp, checkered dress shirt, his hair still a little wet from his post-practice shower. Zhenya felt suitably underdressed in his t-shirt and ripped jeans. 

Zhenya ushered Sid in from where he was lingering in the half-open doorway, and took him down the hall to the kitchen, where Nikita was sitting on a mat on the floor watching tennis on television and yelling every time someone hit the ball with a particularly good flair. 

“We’ve got a little tennis player there, Zhenya,” Anya said to him in Russian and then she turned to Sid and smiled warmly at him, waving with the spoon in her hand. “Hello, Sid.” 

Sid raised a hand in greeting and only stopped hovering once Zhenya insisted all of the dinner tasks were accounted for and nudged him to watch the match for a few minutes. At first, he sat there a little awkwardly in a chair Zhenya had pulled over from the table, watching the match intently while Nikita leaned on his knee. But by the time Zhenya had finished helping Anya set the table, Sid and Nikita were deep in conversation using an awful lot of hand gestures and two languages between them. 

“He’s pretty into it, eh? Little Mr. Opinions you got here,” Sid laughed as Nikita was pointing at the screen, miming the frantic swing of the racket with a furrowed brow. Zhenya scooped Nikita up in his arms and led them both to the dining room, where one half of the table had been cleared off for company. Usually they ate in the kitchen, which Zhenya had thought would be sufficient, but Anya had put her foot down about it, fussing around until there was enough space for four. Zhenya didn’t get what the big deal was; Sid was one of the most unfussy people he knew. 

Dinner was largely an easy affair, with most of their time spent discussing the upcoming season and Nikita’s latest toddler milestones. After a while, Nikita got riled up and started darting off his chair and onto the floor, wandering off into the hall and back, not even swayed by the tablet.

“Nikit!” Anya chided, abandoning her seat to fetch him and bring him back from where he was futzing around noisily in the kitchen. 

“Sorry,” Zhenya said to Sid, hoping that their unruly toddler wouldn’t dissuade Sid from his earlier offer, though it wasn’t as if he would have to deal with it. It would still, in practice, be Zhenya’s kid. 

“No big deal,” Sid said, smiling with an ease that he hadn’t yet had that evening. He shrugged and leaned back in his chair like he was recalling fond memories. “Taylor was a fucking handful when she was younger. Too much energy. I don’t know how my parents kept up.” 

Anya returned with Nikita squirming in her grasp. “You going to sit still?” she asked him in Russian, ruffling a hand through his hair. Zhenya watched him nod impishly and loved him all the more for it. It was so enjoyable and bit bizarre to watch him grow into a little person. 

“Wanna sit with me, buddy?” Sid asked, grinning wide, ever at ease around children. “I’m done eating, c’mere.” He patted his leg under the table and Anya caught Zhenya’s eye as Nikita crawled firmly into Sid’s lap and started asking him questions, as if to say: ‘See? There’s nothing to worry about.’ 

Zhenya didn’t know why it mattered much. Sid didn’t need to get along with their son just to help them make a baby, even though he loved Nikita, and had come over ostensibly “for dinner” more than a few times just to get in a little floor hockey time. 

After dinner, Zhenya got tasked with carting Nikita off to bed, and he came downstairs to find Anya and Sid still in the dining room, open bottle of wine between them on the table. Anya had her game face on. Sid’s was a familiar shade of pink. 

“He told me, yeah,” Sid was saying to her, no doubt talking about Zhenya’s embarrassing ‘issues.’ Zhenya was glad he had missed that part of their conversation tucking Nikita into his crib. He made his footsteps louder as he rounded the corner and took his seat, scooting closer to Anya and taking the wine and overfilling his glass. 

“Don’t scare him,” Zhenya told her. “No gruesome details.” 

“He’s a big boy,” Anya replied, and turned back to Sid with a warm smile and said to him in slow, measured English. “So, how we do this? You want come over? Or maybe you like more your own house?” 

“Seriously, whatever you guys want is fine,” Sid said, hands raised in surrender. “I’m not the captain here.” Zhenya scrutinized the even look on his face to pick out some meaning, but beyond the soft blotchy pink across his nose, he was giving nothing away. 

“Maybe your house,” Zhenya interjected, because thinking about Sid jerking off in his home, even tucked away downstairs in the guest bath, was giving him hives. “We give you like—cup. With lid.” He wasn’t sure what they were called and mimed screwing and unscrewing. “You bring over, we do, done.” 

Sid laughed softly at Zhenya’s blustering. “Sounds like the height of romance, eh.” 

“Shh,” Zhenya said. He didn’t need Sid’s nonsense. “Not romance for you, you like—toy we use for baby.” 

“Zhenya!” Anya chided, but then she and Sid immediately dissolved into awkward peals of laughter and Zhenya felt great about himself. He was hilarious. This didn’t have to be sad and heavy and fraught if they didn’t want it to be. 

Zhenya was watching Sid’s crinkled up eyes when Anya spoke. “Sorry, Sid. Let’s do schedule?” She had her tablet out and she opened it and pulled up her calendar. She slid it across the table to Sid and pointed at some of the dates. “Probably like here? It’s not like, exact, but I text Zhenya when it’s soon, okay?” 

“Yeah, okay,” Sid said, nodding along like a dutiful schoolboy, happy to fulfill his after-hours extra credit. God. “Hopefully after we’re back from out west—don’t think you’ll wanna fly out to Vancouver just for some—” He trailed off and made a quick gesture and Zhenya snickered watching his face morph through boyish amusement and then the awkward realization of miming fucking in front of Zhenya’s wife like he was holding court in the middle of a team lunch. 

Anya, bless her, snorted into her arm. She was as dirty as anyone; Sid would find out soon enough. 

“Yes, not going to fly to west coast, get pregnant in hotel room, no.” Anya bit her lip through laughter as she spoke, but when she leveled a smirk between the two of them, Zhenya knew she meant business. “I’m captain here. I make rules. You come to me.” 

After they sent Sid home with a game plan and a tote bag full of leftovers, Zhenya went into the kitchen to find Anya leaning against the counter staring at the electric kettle and decompressing. She had bundled herself up in a large sweater, thrown on over her dress. Zhenya stood there next to her and watched the kettle boil. 

“You feeling okay?” he asked her, as the kettle beeped and flicked off. “Good game face in there.” 

Anya pulled two mugs from the cabinet and filled them and handed one to Zhenya. It was piping hot, nearly too hot to touch. “I don’t need him to see me weeping,” she said. She took a sip of her tea and slid her body into Zhenya’s until they were pressed together from hip to shoulder. “I hate it anyway. You know I don’t like to feel helpless. Maybe this won’t work, you know? But I’d like to hope it might.”

Zhenya knew how she worked. Anya loved nothing more than convincing herself that all that stood between abject hopelessness and glowing success was a little bit of determination. Wallowing was in Zhenya’s blood. Anya never stayed down for long. “You think he’s the right choice?” Zhenya asked. 

“You think I had a list?” Anya teased. She poked him companionably in the stomach with her arm. “No, you know—it’s probably never going to not be weird, the idea of trying to make a baby that isn’t yours, but it would probably be even weirder if it were a stranger, I think. I like it. Knowing.” 

They stood there together with their tea for a while, looking out the window at the dark yard and the woods beyond. When it was time to go to bed, Zhenya rinsed the mugs in the sink and Anya turned off the lights until only one was left on, just outside the hall, a warm orange glow casting shadows around the walls and across the floor. 

“You think the baby will have Sid’s nose?” Zhenya wondered aloud as they climbed the stairs, mostly teasing her. “Maybe we should have chosen someone better looking. A model.” 

Anya scoffed. “Fat chance.” Zhenya followed her down the hall to their bedroom, and tucked her against the doorframe, giggling softly like naughty schoolchildren, the most Zhenya had smiled in weeks. “Besides, Zhenya,” she continued, pressing a long manicured finger into his chest. She had a wicked glint in her eye. His favorite; the one he loved. “Surely his nose isn’t bigger than yours.”

///

The team went to Western Canada for a week and Zhenya got a bevy of weird texts on his phone: photos of Anya’s cervical mucus, bank notifications about an online purchase of disposable oral syringes, a message from Sid with a link to an article that seemed to explain the temperature necessary for sperm viability. The article was in English; Zhenya didn’t read it.

He felt hopeful, though, puffed up by the way the team was playing, and happy to have a plan. They could move forward like this, instead of just staying stuck in the endless mud of Zhenya’s guilt and frustration. Hell, maybe they would even get lucky, and it would only take one month and Anya would be pregnant by Thanksgiving. Zhenya didn’t want to think about how grumpy he would be if Sid’s swimmers hit bullseye on the first try. It was stupid to feel jealous about it. 

“Did you read that article I sent you?” Sid asked him one night, sandwiched between the booth and Zhenya’s arm at some bar with the team after a win in Edmonton. Over the years, Zhenya had realized that there was nothing much to do in Edmonton that wasn’t playing hockey or drinking, preferably inside where it was more than 0 degrees. 

Sid had most of a beer in his hand but—judging by his slow smile and his dark eyes—it wasn’t his first. “Shh, quiet,” Zhenya said. No one else on the team knew. He wanted very much to keep it that way. He didn’t want to hear their opinions. It wasn’t between anyone but him and Sid and Anya. And maybe the doctor, eventually. Strictly need-to-know. 

Sid was not deterred. He lowered his voice half a step at most and tucked his face in toward Zhenya’s neck, which honestly was _more_ suspicious. “Lot of great info in there. Didn’t realize there was so much research that went into baby-making, eh? What did people do before Google?” 

Pray. Probably. “I think they figure out,” Zhenya said, mostly to shut him up. Hopefully this kid wouldn’t have Sid’s penchant for running his mouth. Sometimes he was great company, kind, a good listener. The other 60% of the time was chaos. 

Zhenya filched a sip of Sid’s beer. Sid tried to look intimidating about it, but Zhenya’s ensuing foamy smirk reduced him to laughter. “You like? It’s good.” 

“You don’t say,” Sid said, still laughing, and let Zhenya’s diversion sway him toward some other, more appropriate table conversations. Whose kids were sick. What everyone was planning to dress up as for Halloween. 

They didn’t talk about it again until Zhenya got the go-ahead from Anya that things were trending rapidly towards ovulation. “No plans after we back,” he told Sid one night before a game, once everyone had cleared out from the kitchen. Sid was peanut-buttering some bread on autopilot at the counter while Zhenya stared deep into the bowels of the toaster, trying to decide if it was the right time to pop it back up. 

“You’re gonna get that in the face, you know,” Sid said, voice garbled around a spoonful of peanut butter. “It’s, uh—it’s time?” Zhenya had assumed up until now that Sid was feeling pretty laissez-faire about the whole ordeal. Confident. Self-assured. What did he have to do besides jack it into a cup and deliver it to Zhenya’s house unscathed? But he seemed almost nervous now. 

“Anya says, yes,” Zhenya said. His toast came out too dark, and he scraped the char off and popped the corner in his mouth. Nothing a little jam wouldn’t fix. “When it’s my job, she says ready, I say okay. So no plans.” 

Sid leaned back against the counter, trying to smirk through his mouthful of sandwich, which looked less dumb and more devastating than it should have. Zhenya didn’t want to think about it. “I think I have _some_ plans.” 

Good god. Zhenya needed to shut this down _right_ now. Already, he was thinking about it: Sid in his living room on that stupid leather couch he had that sagged in the middle, pants undone and pushed down. What would he think of while he did it? Probably he had some go-to fantasies—

“Time for game, let’s go.” Zhenya needed to be not here and not thinking about this. He felt approximately nineteen years old and itchy and oversized in his own skin. What had he gotten himself into, even entertaining Sid’s offer to _knock up_ his _wife_? “Don’t leave crumbs, Sid!” he said and then he shoved the rest of his toast in his mouth and wiped his hands on his shirt and left Sid in the dust.

///

“What time did he say he would be over here?” Anya asked. She was uncharacteristically jittery, arranging and rearranging the supplies on the bedside table: syringes, paper towels, the nice water-based lube. Zhenya grabbed her hands and held them together.

“Anya. Relax.” Zhenya was already nervous enough for both of them. “I texted him a few minutes ago. He’ll be over here as soon as he can.” 

“Maybe we should have had him come over here to—” she started to say. She ripped her hands from Zhenya’s grip and rubbed one through her hair. “Fuck! What if this doesn’t work? I really don’t want to talk to the doctor about this. I know she’s not going to like it.” 

Zhenya kissed her forehead and her flushed cheeks. He never quite knew what to say, but kissing seemed to work. It was his go-to. Anya slowly settled in his grip, grumbling to herself a little. “Maybe you should try to get me off once before he gets here. I can’t calm down.” She slid her palm across his legs to cup him through his sweats. He was soft, but probably it wouldn’t take long to get him going if she kept that up. 

Zhenya’s phone started going off, though, buzzing around on the bed. “Hey, I’m uh—I’m outside,” Sid said on the other end when he picked up. Zhenya untangled himself and went downstairs, pulling open the front door to find Sid there bundled up in a coat even though it wasn’t terribly cold. 

“Sorry, I uh—” Sid said, fumbling with the zipper on his coat and pulling a paper bag out from where it was tucked up next to his chest. “Here. I heard that if you keep it close to you it stays close to body temp so—you know. I tried to drive as fast as I could.” 

“Thanks,” Zhenya said, because what else were you supposed to say to your longtime friend and teammate after he handed you a baggie of his own ejaculate? Zhenya opened the bag and peered at the cup inside. 

Sid rocked back and forth on his feet, hands stuffed into his pockets. “So, uh—same time tomorrow?” he asked. 

Zhenya fisted the bag in his hand until his knuckles hurt. “Yes, tomorrow.” 

“Well, good luck?” Sid said. He pulled his hand out of his pocket for a moment like he might reach out to pat Zhenya’s arm, but quickly aborted the gesture, an awkward, tense cheerfulness on his face. “Let me uh—know how it goes.” 

Zhenya said his goodbyes and hustled back upstairs with bag in hand, tossing it onto the bed. “Be careful with that!” Anya said. “Oh my _god_ , Zhenya.” 

“Ready?” Zhenya was already taking his sweats off. He decided to leave his underwear on and climbed onto the bed, tugging at Anya’s bare ankle, smiling at her, filled with nervous anticipation. “Gonna make a baby, Jerry.” 

“We better,” Anya said, shucking her shorts and tossing her tank top over her head, leaving her bare all over, nipples dark and pebbled in the cool bedroom air. 

Zhenya had watched like, four whole instructional videos about how to suck the come into the syringe and how to insert it close to the cervix but not _in_ it. Endless minutes of footage he immediately had to scrub from his YouTube browsing history. But with the container of Sid’s spooge unscrewed and the syringe in his hand he kept shaking, fingers clammy trying to get it all in. Fuck. This had looked pretty easy when someone else was doing it. 

“You good?” Anya asked, peering curiously at him from where she was situated in her nest of pillows. A quilt from the spare room was tucked under her hips. She was entirely bared to him, her legs spread wide. Zhenya wanted to feel way more turned on by it, but mostly he felt weird. Uncertain. Transactional. 

“Fine,” Zhenya answered as he finally sucked all the goop into the syringe. He set it by Anya’s hip and lubed up his fingers a little, getting one and then two inside her. She was dry inside with little give, and he stroked his free hand over her lower abdomen for comfort. “Hey.” He smiled warmly at her, trying to pretend that he definitely had it together. He wanted to radiate the same confidence she had radiated a week ago, planning out this scheme with Sid over dinner like it was a routine business meeting. 

Anya squirmed on his fingers and kept looking down at her hip where the syringe lay. “Don’t let it get cold,” she chided. Zhenya scrambled to pull his fingers out and get in position, tucked up against her ass. He went to test the pusher on the syringe and some of it squelched out, shooting from the tip and hitting Anya’s raised knee. 

Zhenya cursed under his breath. God. “Sorry,” he said. The remaining bit of it would have to do. He lined it up at Anya’s entrance and pushed in slowly until he hit resistance. 

“It’s in?” he asked, and when she nodded, he pressed down, releasing everything into Anya’s body. It felt a little weird looking down at his hand shoved against her cunt. He looked up at her face instead: her eyes were screwed shut, but it didn’t look like it was in pleasure. Well, he couldn’t imagine stiff, lukewarm plastic was that comfortable. 

“I think it’s all out,” she said, eyes still shut. Zhenya filled the syringe again and re-administered it, managing not to shoot it out all over her body this time. When it was all gone, he tossed the syringe on the side table and ran a hand up the back of Anya’s leg, bending over her body to kiss her mouth. 

“Anyushka,” he said, kissing the warm skin of her jaw, tense under his lips. He couldn’t think of a time that being in bed with Anya had been _less_ sexy. He was pressed up against her with just the thin fabric of his underwear between them and he was still barely stiff. “You wanna lift up a little? C’mon you’re supposed to—” 

“I think that’s bullshit,” Anya said, but let him put another pillow under her ass until she was mostly upside down. 

“Maybe I could help,” Zhenya told her, hands stroking the crease between her labia and her thigh, where she was usually pretty sensitive. “I heard if you come it might—it’s supposed to help the sperm go in more, or something.” 

“Oh yeah?” she asked, but the flirtation didn’t sound entirely genuine. He could feel it in the line of her body that she was still worked up, muscles rigid everywhere he touched. “Maybe I heard that somewhere too.” 

“You wanna?” he asked. No matter how weird he felt about it, he hadn’t seen her for over a week. He kissed the inside of her thigh and the loose skin of her abdomen, where it had stretched when she’d been carrying Nikita. He dug his hands into her raised hips and brought her pussy to his mouth, licking slowly over her for a long time until she began to settle. But she was quiet, only moving her hips in small circles after a few minutes, brow knitted together trying to chase her orgasm. 

“Can you give me a couple fingers?” she asked. Zhenya’s tongue was sore at the back and beginning to tire. He was hard just from the taste of her, the strange mix of her skin and the taste of Sid’s come that he didn’t want to think about. He slid two fingers inside her, pushing deep where there was thick wetness lingering at the bottom and pressed in and out like that, sucking lightly on her clit, until she sighed a little and grabbed at his hair to pull him off. 

“M’good,” she said, rolling out from under him and walking off into the washroom. But Zhenya knew what good sounded like; it wasn’t quiet. He heard the sound of the shower cut on and lay there willing his erection to calm down, lest he go down any unwanted rabbit holes, thinking about Anya and Sid mixed together on his hand and his tongue.

///

They did it again the next afternoon, and it went only slightly less badly. All the come ended up _in_ Anya instead of on her, and Zhenya got Anya to make a few keening sounds afterward with one of her dildos, and he rutted himself against her ass until he came.

Scheduling the last day was far more of a hassle. Anya always liked to do it three times at least, but Zhenya and Sid had a home game against the Islanders and then a plane to catch. Asking Sid to alter his game day routines was just inviting trouble, so they’d settled on early morning before practice the day of their flight. Sid showed up with coffee in one hand and his trusty bag in the other, and after Zhenya had done the deed he dragged his ass outside to find Sid still sitting in his car in Zhenya’s driveway, drinking his coffee and talking on the phone. 

Zhenya went over to knock on his window and Sid hung up the phone and turned the car on and rolled the window down. “Car okay?” Zhenya asked. “You don’t need wait for me.” 

“Eh, I don’t wanna get there too early,” Sid said. “Last week I got there so early and I think I made one of the custodians feel bad lingering around while they were cleaning the carpet. You want a ride?” 

Zhenya had been planning to speed to the rink in his Porsche to blow off some of the steam he had built up in the past few days. He wanted it to work out so much, like preferably as soon as possible, maybe yesterday. But he had never performed well under pressure and self-doubt. It felt like a cloud lingering over him. He needed to play some hockey and win a game and probably pray a lot for this pregnancy to take. 

“Uh, sure,” he said, because he didn’t really want to explain all of that to Sid. He should, but he didn’t want to. 

Zhenya wanted a silent drive to the arena, but Sid piped up as they turned off Blackburn Road onto the highway. “Everything going okay?” he asked, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. He drove so slowly. Zhenya would be trapped in this car forever. 

“It’s fine,” Zhenya said. “Thank you for help. It’s big deal; you don’t have to.” 

“No worries,” Sid said. He smiled over at Zhenya as they neared a stoplight and the look made Zhenya’s insides feel just as gooey as they had when he was twenty. It was the last thing he needed. Feeling inadequate as a husband did not need to be added to by rekindling any long-dormant feelings for Sid. He already couldn’t stop thinking about the taste of Sid’s come on his fingers and inside Anya’s body, which he was unfortunately aware of and familiar with now and didn’t want to admit to himself. “I’m not even sure I want kids, you know? Being an uncle is pretty cool. Flexible. I figured it was the right thing to do.” 

Zhenya let that thought sit with him all through practice and the plane ride and the game the following day. Sid _would_ be an uncle to this kid, just like he was to Nikita. Attentive, engaged. Zhenya could let that be the end of any feelings he might find himself wanting to entertain. Sid didn’t want kids of his own, and that was—fine, he guessed. Not everyone had to.

Sid started to circle more, sending Zhenya a few articles a week and then follow-up texts, no matter how many times Zhenya pretended he couldn’t read. Eventually, he wore Zhenya down enough that Zhenya decided he was being kind of a dick about it. He had made the choice to confide in Sid in the first place, for better or worse. 

“You think it worked yet?” Sid asked him one afternoon as they were riding the elevator up to their hotel rooms in Washington. Zhenya was scheduled for a dinner with Sid and the Swedes and Cully later that night, but first he was going to pass out face-down for at least an hour. 

“I don’t know,” Zhenya said. What a strange question. Zhenya didn’t know the secrets of reproduction any more than he knew the inner workings of the English language, or the theory of relativity. “You have spider sense? You know if it’s working?” 

“I like to think my guys are pretty smart,” Sid said, chest puffed out like he was _extremely_ proud of his manly prowess. God, he was a terrible dweeb. Zhenya muffled a laugh. “They know what to do.” 

“If you say,” Zhenya said, and patted Sid roughly on the back. Zhenya loved him, but he was so lame. 

It did not, in fact, work. Anya crawled back into bed early in the morning the day Zhenya was scheduled to fly to Newark, Nikita a sleeping lump in her arms. She settled Nikita between them under the blankets and cradled his head. “Woke up bleeding today,” she whispered mournfully to Zhenya over Nikita’s soft, downy head. She pinched at the bridge of her nose. “I was really hoping but—”

“We can try again,” Zhenya assured her. He could be strong about this, the port in this storm. He dredged up a smile for her. “It’s just the first time. We’ll try again. Sid is really focused, Jerry. He sends me so much research. Like, too much research.” 

“We’ve been emailing,” Anya said. Zhenya knew that they were friendly but hadn’t realized that they had been talking without him. Sid had come over one morning for brunch with the Letangs in tow and spent a long time in the playroom drinking a mimosa and rolling around with Alex and Nikita on the floor like a child. But he hadn’t been back alone. She smiled a small smile. “I think it’s sweet.” 

They lay there for a little longer, cocooned in their own world for a while with Nikita between them. Zhenya wondered idly whether he should have just been okay like this—just one son. But he and Anya had always wanted a big family. There wasn’t any going back now. 

“Can’t believe I didn’t buy any more tampons,” Anya said after a while, staring up at the ceiling. She laughed, soft and a little sad. “Wishful thinking.” 

Zhenya pulled her closer and rubbed at her shoulders. In between them, Nikita squirmed a little and turned over to curl up on Zhenya’s chest. His alarm would go off before too long, but he didn’t want it to. He wanted to stay in here forever. 

“Maybe we should have him over next time,” Anya said, once Nikita had settled back into sleep, her hand held over his upturned ear. “It seems silly to make him schlep over from his house every day. Like he’s a stranger or something. We have a guest bath. We could—make it work.” 

“Uh—” Zhenya said. He kind of didn’t want to, but she was right: Sid was anything but a stranger. And wasn’t that the whole point? “If you think that’s the answer, I guess. Whatever you want.” He was certain that Anya could smell the uncertainty wafting off of him. He felt a little bad about it, but he was only human. 

“It couldn’t hurt,” Anya said. She shrugged. “This house is big enough, right? It’ll be like he’s at the neighbors’.” She stroked the crown of Nikita’s head a little and gave Zhenya a sympathetic smile. “It only has to be weird if you make it weird, Zhenya.” 

He felt plenty weird about it, that was for sure. But Anya was right. It was the sensible thing to do, what the literature recommended in these circumstances. Zhenya was wracked with more guilt than he probably should have been for dragging his heels about his fertility testing all summer. If Anya wanted this to happen, he wouldn’t be the asshole to stand in her way. 

“Okay,” Zhenya said, and flipped the covers off and got up to greet the day. “Sure. Let’s try it.”

///

Sid got injured in the next game and was grumpy to find himself out of the lineup. Zhenya patted him consolingly as they passed each other in Stew’s office one morning. He knew how it went. They were both horrid about it.

But things with the team quickly went from bad to worse. They weren’t winning. Sid was injured, not badly, but enough to be cautious. Hagelin got traded one morning after practice and Zhenya went into one of the bathroom stalls and cursed about it for a few minutes. It never felt great to feel like he had some hand in losing a friend. 

“Zhenya? Can you come in here for a second?” Anya called from inside the washroom one afternoon, while Zhenya was getting ready to head to the rink. Sid wasn’t playing again that night, and Zhenya was certainly feeling the heat like a direct fire under his ass. 

“What?” he asked, tugging on his shirt in the washroom doorway. 

“What do you think this looks like? Objectively.” Anya shoved her wet fingers under his nose. She wasn’t wearing pants and was frowning at him. 

“Uhhhh,” Zhenya had literally no clue. Anya had gotten _very_ invested in the workings of her own vaginal flora and fauna over the course of the year. It looked like bodily fluid. Zhenya couldn’t tell much difference, but he knew what he was supposed to say, because they did this dance every month. “Egg whites? I think?” 

“You’re just saying that,” she huffed, and ripped her hand away and ran it under the sink. It was clear that she wanted to be mad about this for some reason and Zhenya had no earthly idea why. 

“I don’t know!” he said, hands up in surrender. He didn’t have time to stand here and re-hash this. Anya was the best judge of when she was ready and when she wasn’t. She had gone through so many tactics: an app she tracked religiously, measuring her temperature, peeing a _lot_. Zhenya felt like she might as well trust the cycles of the moon. “Can we talk about this later?” 

“Probably like two, three days left,” she said, counting in her head, wiggling as she pulled her shorts back up. “Can you tell Sid? Or do you need me to call him?” 

“We have a game in three days,” Zhenya said. Their schedule was brutal right now. “I think we’re back on—Sunday? Well actually Saturday but we have a game that day so that’s a no go.” 

Zhenya went back into the bedroom to get into his pants and grab his bag and Anya followed, straightening various things on the way. “Sunday, then. Get it on his calendar. Tell him I’ll make him lunch.” 

Asking Sid about it was entirely anticlimactic. Zhenya got so squirmy figuring out how to ask Sid to come over and jack off in his washroom and then Sid let him down with an easy, “Yeah, sure—I suggested it to Anna a couple weeks ago. This podcast I’ve been listening to seems to think that’s the way to go. It’s fine.” So, that was that, then. 

Sid showed up at their house on Sunday morning with a bag slung over his shoulder. He looked big and warm bundled up in a cozy sweatshirt in the cool November weather. “Coffee,” he said, in explanation, putting the bag down inside the doorway. Inside were a few travel thermoses, branded with the logo of a mom-and-pop coffeeshop in downtown Sewickley, one of Sid’s usual haunts. 

Anya had decided that it might be better if Nikita wasn’t underfoot for the day, so Zhenya had shuttled him off to the Birmans’. They would take him to church, which Zhenya did pretty much never. It was one less thing to think about. 

Zhenya made them all lunch, which was mostly just an assortment of breakfast foods stuffed into bread and called a sandwich. Anya had cut up some fruit. They sat in the breakfast nook together and drank their coffee and dragged their heels. Zhenya still wasn’t entirely sure how you initiated this kind of thing. ‘Are you ready to go jerk off in my half bath and make sure you don’t waste any of it’ seemed crude, if accurate. 

“You guys ready for today?” Sid asked out of the blue, one of his favorite tactics. The element of surprise. “What’s the game plan?” He was clearly still running on the high from the team’s win the night before, smiling and spread out wide in his chair. Zhenya was trying not to look straight at him. 

“Same like before,” Anya said. “We only two times since team so busy now, okay? Today, tomorrow.” 

“There’s practice tomorrow,” Zhenya reminded her in Russian. 

“We can make time, Zhenya,” she said, and then turned to Sid again and said in English. “Before or after practice tomorrow? Which you like?” 

“We have a flight after. Game in Winnipeg. Pain in the ass,” Sid said. He stirred his finger through his coffee idly. “Sorry, probably an early morning. I know it’s not ideal.” 

“Is what it is,” Anya said. They had done so many ridiculous things. Zhenya distinctly recalled a month at the start of summer where they had woken up in the middle of the night multiple nights in a row to fuck, Zhenya holding Anya’s legs in the air because some fertility guru she followed had suggested it might up their chances by a few percent. 

Zhenya dawdled by washing some dishes by hand for a few minutes until Anya finished her plate and made her leave. “Can you show Sid the washroom please, Zhenya? Everything he needs should be there,” she asked, kissing Zhenya’s shoulder as she passed by. “I’m going to go get ready. Be up soon?” She pressed herself along his back for a moment, the kind of small intimacy that Zhenya was used to, but it felt magnified now, with Sid watching them. This was immensely weirder than Zhenya had expected. Even Sid was flushed a soft pink, sitting there at the table folding a napkin into smaller and smaller pieces, looking into his empty mug. 

“You done?” Zhenya said, grabbing Sid’s dishes and chucking them into the sink. He took Sid to the washroom off the den and flicked on the light, going hot all over when he realized that ‘everything’ apparently included not just the usual collection cup and a hand towel, but also the _good lube_ , and a _magazine_ that Zhenya recognized as one he kept stuffed into the crack between their cleaning products and the cabinet wall upstairs. How Anya had found it, he didn’t want to know. 

“Okay, so,” Zhenya said, as fast as humanly possible so he could get out of there and think no thoughts at all about Sid sitting and jerking it with Zhenya’s well-worn nudie magazine in his hand. Well, maybe he wouldn’t need it. “Everything right here. You need anything, you text me. Call me when you done. I’m watch TV.” 

He skittered away to the living room, turning on some UFC re-runs and upping the volume until it was nearly unbearable. But he couldn’t turn his brain off, and he was noticeably half-hard in his pants, uncomfortable where his growing erection was pressing his zipper. He was so fucked. Half of him wanted Sid to finish quickly and put him out of his misery, but then Zhenya would probably spend the rest of the day wondering what had gotten him going so fast. What was Sid thinking about? Did he use lube when he jerked off like Zhenya did, getting everything wet and sloppy, or did he like it dry and a little rough? There was no reason that Zhenya needed to know, but he was immensely curious, itchy inside his skin about it. 

When Sid called him, all he said was “Done,” choked off a little, voice strained, and then hung up the phone. His hand was warm when he handed Zhenya the container through the cracked door. On the counter, Zhenya could see his magazine open and creased across the sink. 

Zhenya cleared his throat, trying to will away his erection, in case Sid opened the door more and stepped out before he could escape. “Thanks,” he said. 

“Do you want me to—“ Sid said, trailing off. The door didn’t move. Zhenya could hear a little bit of shuffling. “Should I stick around? In case you guys need—” 

“Take you time,” Zhenya said, trying to be polite, instead of telling Sid to go the fuck home. “I’m uh, I’m upstairs. Thanks.” 

He went upstairs where Anya was fully naked and reading on her phone in bed. She raised her eyebrows at him when she raked her eyes over his body and saw that he was hard. “Someone excited?” she asked, flipping her phone over and scooting up the bed. They had their positions down by now, like clockwork. Zhenya was becoming a veritable syringe pro, even if it still felt a little mechanical. “Hurry up, c’mon. In me. Chop chop.” 

She was so fucking bossy. Zhenya loved it so much and felt settled by it, letting her take the reins. It was easy to focus on Anya and her warm, slender body that he loved so much, and her smile and her generally good demeanor as he loaded the syringe up and slid it inside and rubbed his dick against her clit until she came. Not as loud as he wanted her to be, still slow, hard work, but it was something. 

“It’s still pretty weird, right?” she remarked to him, lying prone on the bed like a starfish after. “The whole—basting. I didn’t think it would feel so unromantic.” 

“Romantic?” Zhenya snorted. “I’m squirting some random sperm inside you. I don’t think it’s uh—supposed to be _romantic_.” 

“It could be, maybe,” she mumbled, then she rolled over a little, restless, planting her face in her pillow. “I don’t know. Forget I said anything.” 

Zhenya looked at her like looking might tell him what she wouldn’t. But before he could parse anything, Anya flipped over and crawled over him and got his dick in her hand where it was still half hard. Her grip was snug. Zhenya’s brain trickled out of his ears just as fast.

And if he thought of Sid’s face while she touched him, and his warm hands and whether he might be listening to them and wondering the same way that Zhenya had about what they were doing and how, it was only an inconvenient coincidence. 

And if he was a little disappointed to wander downstairs afterward and find the den and the living room empty, the TV dark and unchanged from Zhenya’s channel, well—it was nothing. It meant nothing.

///

Zhenya went into December with a renewed confidence that it all might work out. A first try success would have been blind luck. Surely their chances were better now.

But when Anya got her period again during the team’s mid-December roadtrip and texted Zhenya a bunch of frowning emojis and red hearts, Zhenya’s confidence sank. He knew that things weren’t always simple, even when there were no medical obstructions to deal with. But he had been hoping. 

Zhenya snuck into the house after a late flight back from a loss in Chicago and Anya was still awake, bundled up in a fluffy sweatshirt and watching television in bed. “You’re still up?” he asked. The clock read 1 am.

“Just thinking,” she said. She sighed and turned the television off, pulling the blankets aside as Zhenya stripped down for bed. “Can’t sleep.” 

Zhenya climbed under the covers, sliding in close until their legs were touching. He dropped a kiss on the side of her head where her hair was greasy and curling a little. “Anything I should know about?” he asked. He didn’t want to push her too far, but. Sometimes she liked a little nudge. 

“It’s nothing,” she said. She took her hair down from its bun and leaned her temple against Zhenya’s shoulder, picking at her fingernails. “Well, maybe. I don’t know.” 

Zhenya let her sit in silence for a moment, running his fingers through the long strands of her hair. “I was thinking—” Anya began to say and then stopped, looking down at her hands. “Maybe we could try something else. With Sid, I mean.” 

“Something else?” Zhenya wasn’t sure what else there was to try, really. 

“Yeah, I—” she said. “Maybe we could do it the more—traditional way.” 

It took Zhenya a moment to parse what she meant, and when he realized it, his body went hot all over. He closed his eyes and then reopened them. It wasn’t a dream at all. “You’re asking me if I want to let some _other guy_ fuck my _wife_ ,” he said, kind of shocked at the idea, even though he had certainly—thought about it before, in the kind of safe, hazy terms of fantasy. 

“Sid’s not just some _other guy_ , Zhenya,” Anya said, sounding thoroughly unimpressed with his braggadocio. “Would it really be so—you make it sound so crude.” 

“Well? What else do you want me to say? This whole thing is already fairly crude, Jerry,” Zhenya said. He hoisted himself up and sat against the headboard, too jittery to stay snuggled up. “You’re really serious about this?” 

“Yes,” Anya said. She crossed her arms across her body, fully suiting up her armor. “I am serious. Obviously I’d like to talk to him about it first, but I’m not sure why you’re kicking up such a fuss about it. I thought you’d be—”

“Thought I’d be what?” Zhenya asked. 

“Well I didn’t think you’d _love_ the idea, but,” Anya said. “Sid is like family, Zhenya. I thought you might at least consider it.”

Sid had been Zhenya’s family for a long time, his partner on the ice and the road. They had become closer still in the past couple of years. But Zhenya couldn’t help but still feel jealous, the mean, dark part of him inside feeling helpless about the fact that some other man was out there helping him get his wife pregnant, even if that other man was one of his closest friends. He knew he should be grateful, but parts of him still wanted to be petty. 

“It’s hard,” he said, for lack of a better way to explain. Zhenya couldn’t even pinpoint what about it bothered him most. Sid and Anya’s budding closeness? His own feelings about Sid that he just couldn’t shake? If he was involved in some way, all of this seemed _easier_ , more like he was just getting a little assistance instead of being replaced. But if he let Sid into their bed, he knew any of his own involvement would quickly lead down a path he wasn’t ready for. 

“Listen, Zhenya,” Anya said. She put a hand on his knee. “I want you to have some say here, but I’m not—I’m not just going to endlessly wallow in something that isn’t working. I didn’t think it would feel so impersonal to do it like this, but it _does_ , and if that’s all that’s standing in my way between having another baby and not, then—” 

“I don’t think that’s—” Zhenya said, and pulled his knee away from Anya’s firm hand. “I don’t think that’s scientifically accurate.” He looked down at her, and her face looked so—fuck. “Sorry, I—I’m not exactly being fair here.” 

“You think?” Anya asked. She followed him, tucking her whole body against the headboard, her sweatshirt brushing his arm. “Zhenya, I know this has been hard on you, okay? I get that. But I’m not going to lie and say I’m not still frustrated. It’s been a long year, and maybe if you hadn’t been so stubborn we—” She trailed off then, pressing at her eyes with her hand. “I’m sorry, fuck. I know this is a weird thing to ask. But I’m asking.”

Zhenya sat there and watched her rub at her face, her fingers coming away wet, shiny in the dim light of the lamp. “It’s definitely weird,” he said. He wouldn’t get the image out of his head for probably the rest of his life: Anya coaxing Sid into bed with her, Sid’s huge body between her legs. Zhenya thought his body might split in two from the warring desires to cry or get aggressively horny about it. “Definitely doing a number on my self-image here, Jerry. Can’t knock you up, letting another man into my bedroom.” He kissed her on the forehead and pressed it there for a moment, letting his thoughts swirl. 

“You can’t deny that he’s not exactly bad to look at, Zhenya,” she said. Zhenya’s cheeks were the ones burning now. He turned his head to hide a smile. Anya knew about him, sort of, in theory—that he had slept with some men. But he didn’t—he didn’t like to broadcast it much, and they hadn’t ever talked about it casually like this. Zhenya wondered if she knew—but there was no way. 

“He’s okay, I guess.” That was all Zhenya would admit on the subject. “Passable.” He still couldn’t really believe that he was about to agree to even think about this. There was no way they would tell the doctor about it now. Zhenya might die on the spot. 

Anya pressed her hands into his side, looking up at him all sweet. She knew she had him exactly where she wanted him to be. “Can you talk to him as well? I’m planning to speak with him, but I feel like maybe he’ll be more—open to it, coming from you.” 

“It’s not me he’s knocking up,” Zhenya said, but he already knew she wouldn’t budge. It was clear that she had this idea all worked out. He pressed her into the headboard, kissing her cheeks and her nose, her plush red mouth. “You always have me doing your dirty work, woman.” 

“You like it,” she said, opening her mouth for him. She tasted salty, like tears.

///

Things only became more complicated with each day that passed. It was clear that Anya and Sid got along and had become closer friends since this whole ordeal had started. Zhenya was always hearing over the dinner table about some podcast Sid had recommended to her, some reddit chat thread they’d been laughing about. Sid was intensely involved in knowing about the whole process. Zhenya couldn’t fathom why he didn’t want his own family.

But he didn’t. And it was holding Zhenya back. Zhenya had promised he would talk with Sid, but he couldn’t really figure out how to bring it up and a cursory Google search was no help. He was on his own. 

“It’s not work,” Zhenya told Sid one morning while they were alone in the stick room, a few days before Christmas. Sid was staring so close at his sticks that Zhenya thought he might take an eye out. 

“Huh?” Sid asked, still in his stick-cutting daze. “Oh. Yeah, Anna texted me about that, actually. We’ll get ‘em next time, eh? Third time’s the charm?” He laughed at his own joke, if a little awkwardly. Zhenya couldn’t help but smile, stomach squirming the way it did lately. 

Zhenya put his focus into cutting his sticks. One of them was at least a centimeter taller than the other and it was driving him _nuts_. Focusing on it was certainly miles better than focusing on his screwed up feelings about Anya telling Sid things without talking to Zhenya about telling him, which was incredibly petty, but Zhenya was feeling it nonetheless. 

“Here, let me,” Sid said, nudging his way in and cutting Zhenya’s stick with the precision saw. It came out perfect. 

“I vote you MVP,” Zhenya said. “Best at sticks.” 

“You bet I am, bud,” Sid replied, patting Zhenya’s arm. He grabbed the palm sander and started sanding the tops of his own sticks and eyed them again, seemingly satisfied, and went out into the hall, on to some other predictable part of his daily routine. 

Zhenya stood in the room for a long time by himself, sanding his sticks until his fingers ached, feeling a strange unease, even though Sid had left and saved him from having to ask him what he absolutely didn’t want to ask. A few of the equipment guys filed in and out, and Dumo and Rusty, who mostly went about their business and left Zhenya alone.

///

Sid’s flight to Halifax wasn’t until late evening on the 23rd and Zhenya and Anya were flying private and could leave whenever they felt like it. Anya had been hovering around Zhenya’s shoulder all week when he wasn’t on the road. “Did you have a chance to talk to Sid?” she asked one night while they were sitting together on the couch long after Nikita had gone to bed. Zhenya was on his tablet reading an article that Denis had sent him about the upcoming soccer season. Anya was doing some work, her glasses slid halfway down her nose. “I think I’m ovulating sooner than I thought, like—maybe this week. Maybe we should have Sid over, before the break. Get one good try in at least.”

“I haven’t had time,” he said, not looking up from his tablet. “Lots of games, practice. Sorry, I keep forgetting. I’ll get to it.” Even though he wouldn’t. He hated having serious conversations. Being vulnerable was terrible and made him squirm. 

“Please do it sooner rather than later,” Anya told him. Even without looking up from his screen he could feel her eyes on him, pointed. 

Zhenya rubbed his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll get to it.” 

Sid came over in the morning the day before they planned to leave, bundled up in a scarf with a gift bag in his hand. “For Nikita,” he said, when Zhenya went to grab it. “Adults don’t get presents. He awake?” He was in the sunroom with Anya, rolling a wiffle ball across the floor until it slammed into the wall. Zhenya watched Sid duck down to Nikita’s level and smile gamely at him. “What’s up, buddy?” 

Nikita loved his gift, which was a collection of mini sticks that Sid had cut from some of his castoffs and taped in bright colors. “My curve is better than your dad’s, okay,” he said. Zhenya snorted. It was absolutely false; there was nothing wrong with his curve. 

“He’s so bad with those things,” Anya said to Sid after Nikita had thoroughly tired himself out running around and slapping the ball at high speed, denting the side of the playhouse and pelting Sid in the knee. “Menace.” 

“So much for no hockey for him,” Zhenya crowed, looking at Anya smugly over Sid’s head. 

Zhenya made tea and set it up at the counter. There wasn’t much time to dawdle with vacation lingering on the horizon, and Zhenya felt the minutes moving past like a ticking clock. Nikita would only nap for so long. 

“You fly tonight? Go home to see family?” Zhenya asked as they drank their tea. Sid filched a cookie from the bowl in the center of the island and ate it until the powdered sugar crumbled all over his mouth. 

“Yeah, night flight,” Sid said, grabbing another cookie. “I’m pretty much packed.” 

“You guys have chance to talk?” Anya asked. So much for staying on safer topics, Zhenya thought. Maybe he could excuse himself for a conveniently timed piss. 

“Talk about what?” Sid asked while chewing. 

Zhenya grabbed a couple cookies of his own, shoving them in his mouth at once to avoid speaking, or thinking, or ideally doing anything at all. 

“I want—well,” Anya said. She shot Zhenya a dirty look and paced to the counter to refill her tea. “Maybe you sit, okay? Let’s sit.” She nudged Sid over to the breakfast nook and sat across from him. Zhenya leaned imposingly against the wall. Anya folded and unfolded her hands until Zhenya thought she might give up speaking at all. 

“Is something wrong?” Sid asked, brow furrowed together. “It feels like I did something wrong here. Was the present for Nikita too much? Is that not—"

“She want to fuck you,” Zhenya blurted and then regretted it immediately once both Sid and Anya turned to look at him like he had suddenly grown an extra head. Perhaps he had. It had felt like he might burst. 

“You want to—what?” Sid’s eyebrows were quickly merging with his hairline. His face had gone pink, flushed all over, his lips dropped open. 

“For—for baby,” Anya rushed to say, skittering her hands across the table to place them on Sid’s hand. “Sorry, Zhenya is so rude. I tell him talk to you before, I think probably it’s easier. You friends, man to man, but—” 

“This isn’t a joke—” Sid said slowly, scratching at his neck. “Sorry, I—I’m just trying to wrap my head around this here.”

“It’s okay if you don’t want—we can do same thing we do before, it’s fine,” Anya started to say, rambling the way she did when she was a little nervous, which wasn’t terribly often in Zhenya’s memory. 

Sid cut her off. “No, I didn’t—I didn’t say I didn’t want, I.” He looked aside, out the window at the yard. It reminded Zhenya of Anya hiding her face in bed, trying to talk to him about the very same thing. “Didn’t really consider this when I offered.” He laughed, but to Zhenya it sounded uncertain. 

“If we do, we have rules, okay?” Zhenya said. He needed some limits. His ego was fragile enough right now. “It’s only for baby. It’s not like—it’s not casual thing.” 

“Yeah, of course,” Sid said. Zhenya stood there and tried to look tough and in charge while he sipped at his tea. “Would you uh—would you be there as well or, um.” His face went even more red then, if that was possible. Zhenya hadn’t wondered much about Sid’s interests since he was in his early twenties. He hadn’t ever seen Sid with a man outside of his nighttime imaginings. 

“Better if I’m not there,” Zhenya said. He knew himself well enough to admit that there wasn’t any way that he would be able to sit there and _watch_ without—his feelings would be written all over his face. It would be strange to putter around the house while Sid and Anya fucked, but even stranger still to be there, sitting in the armchair in the corner like a voyeur, longing desperately to touch. “It’s just—just you. I’m downstairs. I keep Nikita busy. It’s fine.” 

“You’re okay with that?” Anya asked in Russian, turning around to speak to him with quiet concern. “Me and Sid? Alone? I don’t need you to—it’s not about—” 

“It’s fine, Jerry,” Zhenya said. No way would he admit to her what he really wanted, the part deep inside him that had been thinking about it a little, desperate unwanted ideas. All three of them together, making a baby. Making a _family_. But he couldn’t have that. And he would do well to remember it. “I trust you. I don’t need to babysit.” 

Sid looked distinctly unsure, shifting around in his chair, tugging aimlessly at his collar. He took his hat off and ran his hand through his hair and then mashed it back on his head a little crooked. “You wanted to uh. We’re gonna do this today, or? Not sure I’m gonna be able to—perform.” Sid wiped his palms on his jeans and laughed, sounding marginally more like the confident, easygoing guy Zhenya knew. “It’s a lot to spring on a guy right before Christmas, eh?” 

“Don’t need to do today,” Anya assured him. She pulled his hand into hers. “You take time. Go home. Eat mama’s food.” 

At that, Sid cracked a smile. “I’m gonna get pretty pudgy,” Sid said, patting his stomach. “All that ham.” 

“You come back we have New Year party, okay. You come. We try out, maybe, if you want,” Anya said. Zhenya hadn’t heard boo about a New Year’s party, but if Anya wanted one, he would make it happen. “You don’t want, we don’t do. No pressure.” 

She was so good at making everyone around her feel like she had a handle on things. She was running the ship. And Zhenya knew that inside she was maybe a little scared. And maybe he was a little scared. But he admired that about her. She would always try. 

“I can do that,” Sid said, and gave them both a genuine smile. “I’ll give it some thought.” He drained his tea and got up to rinse it in the sink and quickly made his goodbyes, retreating to the comfortable safety of his own home to ruminate for a while, Zhenya was sure. He could relate.

“Lemme know if Nik needs anymore sticks, okay?” he said, lingering in the doorway and letting in the cool winter air. “I have like twenty of them in my garage.” 

“Happy holiday,” Anya said, hugging him solidly around the waist with both arms, instead of the one-armed way she usually reserved for Zhenya’s teammates and friends. It was clear that she trusted him more now, and thought of him as her own friend, instead of just Zhenya’s. It made Zhenya pleased. Sid was good people. One of the best. 

“Safe flight,” Zhenya called as Sid backed down the steps to the drive, and then he ushered Anya back inside and closed the door.

///

Zhenya tried to use the few days they had in Miami to unwind and put Sid from his mind. He and Anya went for dinner a lot, the way they used to when they first started dating. They fucked long and slow in bed in the morning without the pressure of knocking Anya up weighing upon them. Zhenya got a sunburn playing with Nikita in the sand. He tried very hard not to think of Sid at all, except to text him Happy Christmas and send him a picture of a palm tree decorated with rainbow lights. Sid replied with a picture of snow dusting his backyard. Business as usual.

Their New Year’s party was scheduled for the Saturday after their return: technically still part of Russian New Year, which was the only one that mattered in Zhenya’s opinion. Most of their Russian friends in Pittsburgh would come, along with a few of the usual guys from around the team: Horny and his wife, Trinca, Sid. 

Zhenya helped mostly by giving Anya free rein with his credit card, and she and Katya ordered food and champagne and arranged for a flower delivery that they texted Zhenya about, because he would need to be there early in the morning one day to receive them, while Anya and Katya went to the gym. 

While Zhenya was dropping Nikita off with the sitter, Sid texted him about bringing something, because Trina Crosby made known in no uncertain terms that showing up empty-handed was rude. He didn’t, but he showed up with a tray of cookies anyway, dusted with sugar and still warm. 

Anya brought them to Zhenya in the kitchen where he was pulling bottles of wine down from the top shelves. “Did he really?” Zhenya asked, because he had heard Sid and Anya talking in the front hall a minute before. Anya laughed and lifted the lid off the tray and popped one in her mouth. Of course he had. 

A few hours in, after Zhenya was done being lambasted about his poor dart throwing skills by Arthur Birman, who got older and more sly by the day and loved to take the piss out of Zhenya at every opportunity, Zhenya found Sid holed up in the living room with Anya and Katya. He was telling some story with huge hand gestures. Anya kept leaning over into Katya’s ear to speak asides, likely translating some idiom. Sid loved to be confusing in English. 

Zhenya snuck up behind them, laying a hand on Sid’s shoulder. His wine glass sloshed in his grip. “You over here flirt my wife, Sid?” he teased, trying to be innocuous, but Sid looked back at him with flushed cheeks. Like he had no idea that Zhenya had been thinking about it all night. 

“Uhh, I’m gonna plead the fifth,” Sid said, and took a long overdramatic swig of his beer, looking between Anya and Katya who were both still snickering about it. He cleared his throat and shifted over into the arm of the couch, leaving an open space between his leg and Anya’s. “You wanna sit, G?” 

Zhenya came and sat down. He felt drunk enough to be amused by the idea of Sid in here sweet-talking his and Max’s wives, feeling like thousands of birds were taking flight inside his body. Even though Sid had never shown his intentions to be anything other than friendly, Zhenya’s thoughts felt charged with the tentative plans on the table. What if he had found Sid and Anya tucked close together, legs warmly entwined, laughing and smiling at each other in _that_ way. His stomach squirmed. Did Anya think of Sid like that? Zhenya had never asked or had any real suspicion before now, but he was thinking about it, slotting in his own Sid-specific desires. 

“I eat cookie,” Zhenya said to him. Sid was peeling a bit of his beer’s label from the bottle as Katya and Anya talked in quiet voices about something funny that Milanka had done at the grocery store the other day. “You shouldn’t bring. I eat too many, get fat. So slow on ice.” 

“Gonna tell Andy on you,” Sid snickered, smirking at him. Looking so good and more than a little tipsy. 

“Andy not my boss,” Zhenya said, poking his tongue out the side of his mouth. He changed for no man. “I don’t listen.” 

Before too long, Max came in from outside to collect Katya. He smelled like he had been sneaking a cigar. Zhenya got up and foisted some leftover food on them and then on Trinca and everyone else as they came to say their goodbyes and clap Zhenya heartily on the back. Anya came in after ushering the last guests out the door and kissed him on the shoulder. 

“Sid’s still here,” she said, quiet enough that no one else could hear. She leaned there and looked up at him. Zhenya could see in her gaze what she was trying to tell him. She wanted to—she thought it might ease the way if maybe they—

“He’s cool with it?” Zhenya wasn’t certain when she’d had the opportunity to ask. Anya nodded her head, brushing up and down against the fabric of Zhenya’s sweater. 

“It’s weird, right? It feels kind of weird,” she said to him as they went into the living room, where Sid was becoming one with the couch. He’d turned some hockey postgame show on and looked like he was mostly just spacing out in front of it. 

“Still time to back out,” Zhenya said, because nothing else he wanted to say seemed helpful. He reached down to squeeze her hand. 

“Man, Matthews is looking pretty good,” Sid remarked. Some dumb guy from the CBC who Zhenya never paid much attention to was giving his opinion on the Leafs game on TV, which they had handily won. 

Zhenya watched as he scrubbed a hand through his hair and took another drink of his nearly empty beer, leaning back on Zhenya’s tufted sofa like he owned the place. Zhenya would not admit in any way that he found it more attractive than annoying. 

Zhenya plopped down on the couch arm. “You live my couch now?” he asked. Sid’s hair looked soft and mangled from the way he’d been running his hands through it. Zhenya’s hands twitched at his sides. 

“Oh, uh,” Sid said, looking at Zhenya and then Anya in turn. “I can go?” 

Anya came to sit on his other side, close enough that their legs touched all along the thigh. “Don’t have to,” she said. “Can stay, like we say before. Upstairs?” 

“Uh, sure. Yeah,” Sid said. He put his beer on the coffee table and smoothed the legs of his jeans down. “I thought this was only for uh—isn’t it too soon for?” 

“It’s fine,” Anya said, smiling impishly, eyes catching Zhenya’s over the edge of Sid’s shoulder. “Maybe we don’t like each other, you know. We find out today, we go back to other way next time.” 

“Like a trial run,” Sid said. “Practice.” 

Anya laughed, patting Sid’s knee. Her wedding band gleamed on her finger. Zhenya felt a kind of pride that she would wear it. Sid wouldn’t forget that she was Zhenya’s. “Yes, you on PTO contract, we see if you make team.” 

She got him off the couch and sent him upstairs with all the awkwardness of a teenager on prom night. Zhenya snickered a little watching him climb the stairs. He absolutely did not look at Sid’s ass. 

“You ready?” Zhenya asked Anya when they were alone. “You let me know if you need me, okay? Whatever you want.” He kissed her wet mouth and her jaw and her cheeks, all over her face until he was satisfied that she knew his feelings. 

“Thank you,” she said to him before she left, laying her cheek against his chest. His heart was beating a hundred kilometers a minute and he was sure she could feel it and sense his nervousness. “I know it’s not easy for you.” 

“We’ll make it work,” he said and let her go. That was all he wanted. 

It was a special kind of hell to putter around downstairs knowing Anya and Sid were upstairs doing—something. He harkened back to Thanksgiving and thought that it seemed mundane in comparison. Would Anya let him kiss her? Would he want to? Maybe it wouldn’t work, and they would just sit together on the bed laughing. 

Ten minutes felt like hours. Zhenya changed from cable to streaming so he could watch Russian news, letting his mind drift through the motions. He tried to remember what an old trainer had told him about meditation and mindfulness, and mostly failed. He drank a whole bottle of water and crumpled the plastic up in his palm until his fingers were sore and then slumped into an armchair and thought that he was equally terrified and hopeful that things would go well. 

He was broken from his musing by heavy feet padding down the spiral stairs and along the hall, and when he looked up, Sid was standing in the doorway of the den, a throw blanket wrapped around his bare shoulders. His jeans were on but unbuttoned, and Zhenya had to pinch himself a little, because he had absolutely had this wet dream. 

“Hey, G—sorry to—” he said. He ran a hand through his hair, which Zhenya noticed was messier than usual, like he or Anya had been running fingers through it. Zhenya’s own hands twitched to do the same. “Can you—it’s too weird, with you not there.” 

“You can’t do?” Zhenya asked. 

“It’s not that I can’t, it’s just—” Zhenya couldn’t imagine a world where someone was immune to Anya’s charms, even Sid. “It would be better, for me, if you came.” 

Zhenya couldn’t say why he got up and let Sid lead him up the stairs and down the hall to the guest room, except that he had been doing what Sid told him to for a decade now, and he was too weak to say no. The blanket was sliding off him as he walked, revealing the freckled curve of his traps and his shoulder. This was absolutely the weirdest threesome that Zhenya had ever had, an aggressive out-of-body experience. 

Anya was sitting cross-legged in bed when Zhenya entered and she gave Zhenya a small, tentative smile. Zhenya’s feet felt cemented to the carpet as Sid sat gingerly on the corner of the mattress, folding the blanket up into a messy square and sitting back on his hands. 

“You going to stand there all night?” Anya said. “C’mere.” 

He’d had some idea that perhaps he might sit in the chair across the room and mostly look at the wall while Sid felt marginally less guilty about fucking Anya for some reason because Zhenya was physically in the room. But he went where Anya wanted him and slid in next to her on top of the covers, and put his hand on her bare leg, freshly waxed and warm. She had her panties on, and a t-shirt with no bra, her nipples obvious through the thin fabric. “He’s nervous,” she whispered to him, even though Sid understood about five whole words in Russian. 

“I gathered,” he said, teasing her to ease the tension a little. “You’re very intimidating.” 

She smacked him lightly on the cheek as she pulled him in for a kiss, and then pulled off wetly to say in English, “Sid, here please. Watch.” 

Zhenya could feel Sid’s warm, assessing gaze as Anya pulled him in for another kiss. He kissed back stiffly at first, finding it hard to relax. “Love you,” Anya whispered against his mouth.

She put her arm out to pull Sid closer to them, and Zhenya’s shoulder was touching his skin, and Sid looked so young. Zhenya felt maybe more nervous than he had ever felt in bed, unprepared for any iteration of what came next. He was careful to slip himself aside and keep his hands away from anywhere they might touch Sid’s body as Anya directed Sid in close and put his face in her palm and kissed him. 

Zhenya couldn’t imagine how he thought he could keep his eyes off Sid and Anya, watching them now. The kiss was awkward, unpracticed. Anya was clearly trying her best to calm Sid’s palpable nerves as she ran her fingernails down his bicep and kissed him slowly, coaxing his mouth open. Zhenya could see Sid’s chest rising and falling with deep, uneven breaths that got smoother the longer Anya kissed him. “Shit, I—” Sid said, wrenching himself back. “That’s. Jesus.” 

“She’s good,” Zhenya crowed. It felt easy to be proud of her. Anya was her own person, and Zhenya knew how overwhelming she could be. She was emotional and sometimes unsure. But she had this terribly electric energy, and Zhenya loved to watch her turn it on. 

“Yeah,” Sid said, and did this dorky wolf-whistle, leaning back on his elbows, the thick muscles in his arms bulging as they took his weight. “How should I—” 

It was discomforting to watch Sid’s heavy-lidded gaze, slightly droopy from the beer. Zhenya could see that he was turned on a little and didn’t blame him: his dick visible through his jeans, his chest flushed a deep pink. Every muscle in Zhenya’s body was taut with trying to keep himself under control—he’d never had a threesome with another man before, but it seemed like the best way to get through it was to put all his focus on Anya. They were here in service of her. It wasn’t about what Zhenya wanted, when what he wanted was to be smashed between them, squirming and hard and sore. 

“Don’t move,” Anya told Sid, climbing on top of him, hovering a little. She hadn’t removed anything more, but Zhenya could see her getting a little wet through her underwear, and he clenched his teeth. Zhenya strained to hear her keep talking to Sid, her voice gone low and private, nervous. “It’s okay? I touch you?” 

Zhenya watched Sid nod. It felt dirty, like he was doing something salacious, watching some X-rated videotape waiting for his parents to come home. Would the guys be able to smell it on him tomorrow? He felt like maybe it would be written in red ink all over his face: ‘I let Sid fuck my wife and I watched and I _liked_ it. I _asked_ him to.’ 

What would he say to Sid tomorrow? ‘Good game, buddy’? Would they pretend like nothing had happened? 

He watched Anya stroking Sid over his underwear. He kept bucking into it, little curls of his hips that Zhenya felt himself mimicking. Zhenya was hard in his own pants now, and he pressed his heel against it with the same slow rhythm, trying to be sneaky about it. It felt like one thing to be here for moral support and another entirely to get off on it by himself like a voyeur. 

“Maybe you touch me,” Anya teased. She ducked her head and Zhenya could hear the wet sounds of kissing. 

“You think he wants me to—” Sid started to protest, before Anya pulled his hand from his side and dragged it down where she wanted it. Zhenya could see the tips of Sid’s fingers curling up from where Anya’s legs were spread. He couldn’t help it anymore, he had to. He put his hand down his pants and gripped himself, holding tight at the base. He was already leaking a little, which was pretty embarrassing, and everything was sticky and warm. He watched Sid’s fingers move tentatively at first, and then with more purpose once he felt comfortable, rubbing over Anya’s clit through her underwear until she was groaning a little. Jesus. 

“Quick learner,” she said to him, and then craned her head back to smile at Zhenya over her shoulder and said in Russian. “Maybe not as good as you, but he knows what he’s doing.” 

“Stop talking about me, eh,” Sid said, laughing a little as Anya flicked her hair into his face and pressed her hips down into his hand, chasing the friction. Zhenya watched her melt a little with each touch, becoming more comfortable. 

“When we do for real it’s like—I like to be on my back, okay? But not today,” Anya said. Zhenya could see her hands wrapping around the waistband of Sid’s jeans, tugging them down a little so they were trapped over his huge thighs. Zhenya really couldn’t help but look when Sid’s dick was revealed, and he cupped his hand around the head of his own dick, digging his fingernails in a little to dull the excitement. He’d seen Sid naked plenty of times, sure, but never hard. 

But it was watching Sid’s hands flitting just so across the skin of Anya’s hips as she grabbed the base of Sid’s cock and situated herself that blew his cover. “God, this is fucking surreal,” Sid said to himself, eyes trained firmly on Anya’s pussy where her underwear was twisted to the side. Zhenya knew well how nice that view was—shiny and pink, lovingly waxed. He couldn’t help but groan. Sid redirected his gaze to Zhenya: his fist in his pants, his sweaty body through his t-shirt. Anya’s back was a rigid line. 

“Something you want to share, Zhenya?” Anya asked him, thankfully in Russian, so Sid wouldn’t understand and Zhenya couldn’t get embarrassed about it. “Come.” 

Zhenya tentatively took his hand from his dick and crawled over to them, careful not to touch Sid’s legs too intentionally, stroking a palm down Anya’s back when he got close enough. 

“Come help,” Anya said, eyes dark. He could see her enjoying herself. He felt both glad to be wanted and slightly terrified that he might blow his cover. For all Zhenya knew, Sid had no interest in men. And this was already weird enough without making it weirder by accidentally _involving_ himself in a way that let Sid know that he was. Interested. 

He draped himself over Anya’s back and tucked his face in her hair, which smelled like old perfume. He fought the urge to hide from Sid’s eyes; he could feel them, looking at him over the curve of Anya’s neck, and he could feel the tips of Sid’s fingers on her sides, brushing the very edges of Zhenya’s hips as he nestled himself against Anya’s ass. 

Anya was stalling, hand gripping the base of Sid’s cock, frozen in place. Zhenya could hear Sid breathing. “You gonna leave him like that, Jerry?” he asked. He wanted her to just do it already, because if they drew this out for much longer, he wasn’t sure he could keep it together enough not to touch Sid himself, just for a moment. He could write it off. It would be an accident. 

But Anya sank down on him and Sid groaned, like—full and throaty. Zhenya sucked at the warm skin on the back of Anya’s neck to avoid making any noise, but he rutted against her ass in time with Anya riding Sid’s cock, and felt largely out of body. It felt a bit like _he_ was riding Sid, which he absolutely had thought about furtively in his hotel room many years ago and didn’t want to think about now or he was going to come. 

“Help me out here.” Anya’s voice was hoarse, breath taking over. When Zhenya peeked over the curve of her cheek at Sid, he looked similarly affected, head held back a little, tension in the line of his jaw. His eyes were scrunched shut and his mouth was open in a big pink ‘o.’

Zhenya tucked his hand inside Anya’s panties, pressing hard on her clit, the kind of rough sustained pressure she always asked him for. He kept bumping his fingers against Sid’s dick as he worked, and after a while Sid was just straight-up sliding against the side of Zhenya’s thumb, the sticky-slick feeling of the lubed condom rucking up and down as he moved. 

“Fuck, fuck, I—” Sid was saying. Zhenya felt like he was going out of his mind, caught between Sid and Anya like this. It felt forbidden. It _was_ forbidden. “Jesus, you guys. I’m seriously not gonna last.” 

Anya smiled and tucked her face in Sid’s neck, but it only brought Sid’s face in closer, hooked over Anya’s shoulder mere inches from Zhenya’s own. He was making a stupid amount of eye contact. Zhenya kept blinking his eyes shut and opening them again to find Sid still staring at him, brow knit together a little like he was studying the intricacies of Zhenya’s face. 

“How you doing?” Sid asked him as Anya squirmed a little atop him and moaned. “You have room to work? Fuck—keep your hand there.” Zhenya stilled as he said it, and felt as frozen as a statue, letting Sid roll his hips in forward circles, half in and half out of Anya’s pussy as Anya shook between them. 

“C’mon, Jerry. C’mon,” Zhenya loved listening to her make those fucking noises; she got so loud when she was really into it, and it did it for him in so many ways. “You can be loud, c’mon.” Zhenya pinched her clit between his thumb and forefinger and listened to her groan as she came, twitching under his fingers. 

“Geno, shit.” Sid was still looking at him as Anya convulsed around him, and Zhenya could see his eyes blown nearly black from how good it felt. Their noses were nearly brushing. 

“Sid—” Zhenya heard himself saying, and then Sid pressed forward and kissed him, dragging Zhenya’s lip into his teeth as they rocked together. Sid didn’t kiss like Zhenya had imagined. It was sloppier, more forceful. Zhenya’s youthful fantasies had been saccharine sweet. 

It was the kiss that took him over, rocking there against Anya’s ass with his dick out through the hole in his underwear, slick and sweaty, his tongue in Sid’s mouth. He felt Sid groan into his mouth after a moment, and Anya clenching up, no doubt feeling the warm rush of Sid’s come filling the condom inside her. 

“Zhenya,” Anya was saying softly as Zhenya came to. “Fuck, you so heavy. Move you fat ass.” Zhenya could feel Sid’s laugh vibrating against his flushed cheek and knew that Anya had spoken in English expressly for his benefit. 

Zhenya kissed Anya’s neck and rolled off of her, feeling sticky and a little more sober than was pleasant. His mouth was sore from kissing, his dick chafed. 

Anya padded into the washroom to clean herself up. Zhenya watched Sid from the corner of his eye: sitting up at the end of the bed, his big body flushed and covered in marks from Anya’s hands and the crumpled-up sheets. He tugged the condom off and tied it and looked around awkwardly. “Is there somewhere I should—?” he asked, holding it up. 

“Here.” Zhenya pulled the trash bin from under Anya’s bedside table and tried not to look too much while Sid came over and discarded the condom. Had it been an accident? Zhenya couldn’t stop wondering, now that Sid was the kind of guy who kissed another man. Perhaps it could be excused—the presence of women had always excused a lot of homoerotic behavior in Zhenya’s social circles. Perhaps this was no different. 

When Anya came back from the washroom, she left the light on and it flooded the room in a pale light. Sid was pulling his socks back on, his back muscles stretching the confines of his thin sweater. Anya gave Zhenya a curious look and went over to him. “You leave?” she asked. Zhenya was a bit surprised by the question. He hadn’t figured Anya for the type to want Sid to stay, but maybe she was feeling more vulnerable than Zhenya could predict. That made two of them. 

“Yeah I should—” Sid said, and rolled his pants back over his socks and straightened up. “This was good, I—but game tomorrow, you know? Promise you don’t want me kicking you at four in the morning.” Zhenya could see him trying to be chipper and friendly about it, but the tension in his body gave him away. Something was off. 

“Go home safe, okay?” Anya said. She put both arms around Sid’s shoulders like she would a good friend and reached up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Sleep good.” 

Sid made a quick retreat, down the stairs and out the front door without so much as taking a leak. Zhenya rolled over onto his face in the bed, bone tired both physically and emotionally. Anya came into bed after a few minutes, still in her tank and underwear, and curled into Zhenya’s side like a child. 

“You want to talk about it?” Anya asked him, hand on his back. He hoped for the pillow to swallow him whole. 

“Not really,” he said. Some part of him had wondered if perhaps Anya had missed what had transpired between him and Sid in the midst of her orgasm, but it was clear that she had seen or felt it. She wouldn’t let Zhenya stay quiet about it for long. 

“Get some sleep,” she said to him before turning over and spreading out and breathing long and slow. Zhenya listened for a while instead of sleeping, wondering what kind of thing they had gotten themselves into.

///

Zhenya picked up Nikita from the babysitter the next morning and listened to him prattle on in the car about the sleepover he had, and the monster beneath their guest room bed, letting the familiar excited sound of it soothe him back into normal life.

“I’ll talk with him,” he said to Anya on his way out the door, but at the rink, he didn’t get any chance to be alone with Sid before the game, and then they lost in annoying fashion to the Blackhawks _again_. Zhenya knew that there was absolutely a next-to-zero chance that either he or Sid would be nice to each other if they talked after a game like that. Losses made a kind and understanding man out of no one. 

He didn’t get a chance see Sid outside of team-related duties until they were both stuck in Stew’s office after practice a few days later: Zhenya getting his shoulder worked over, and Sid spread out on a training table with an ice bag on his knee. 

“I have to take this,” Stew said, picking up his phone where it was skittering across his desk. “I’ll be a few minutes. Don’t fucking move.” 

“Yes, boss,” Zhenya groaned, muffled into the table. Sid had mostly been ignoring them, idly thumbing through his phone, but when Stew let the door click closed behind him, Sid set his phone down and smiled cautiously at Zhenya. 

“Listen,” he said, “About the other night.” Zhenya’s stomach felt sour thinking about where this conversation might lead. Would Sid yell at him now, in the light of day? Zhenya had initiated the touch. Would he call the whole thing off, all their progress down the drain? Zhenya couldn’t think of many positive outcomes. 

“Sorry I’m like—I’m make weird.” Maybe if he apologized before Sid could say anything it would soothe the ache of what Sid might say. Most people thought of Sid as endlessly kind and inoffensive, and he was kind, but he had opinions, and he got stubborn and hard-nosed about them sometimes and couldn’t see beyond his own face. 

“No, don’t worry about it.” Sid looked like he wasn’t sure why Zhenya was apologizing, which, okay. “It was definitely pretty weird before you got there. Anna and I kept staring at each other, like, face off style. She thought I was super nervous about it, which—fair.” 

“She very intimidating,” Zhenya said. He could feel himself smile a little. He tried to take a breath. “It’s okay for you? You like? She’s worry when you leave so fast, I think.”

“Are you kidding me? It was,” Sid rubbed his hand over his face, knocking his hat back until it tumbled to the floor. He had a red line from the band on his forehead and his hair was soft and matted down. “It was definitely more than okay, man. She, uh. Yeah it was—it was good, don’t worry about it.” 

Zhenya snickered but tried not to do it too hard or his shoulder would start hurting again, sore from wear and tear. “Sorry we like,” Zhenya said, and tucked his face a little further away from Sid’s eyes. “Next time I don’t kiss. Don’t know why I do.” 

“Oh, is that what you’re apologizing for?” Zhenya’s cheeks were surely an unsightly shade of pink and he hoped Sid couldn’t see from across the room. “Well I don’t think you—I kissed you first, you know. I don’t know why you’re sorry about it.” Zhenya peeked at him and he had a hand on his neck, tugging a little at his shirt collar like he was overheating. Stew never kept the office above 18 degrees. Zhenya’s arms were covered in goosebumps. 

When Zhenya didn’t answer, Sid just kept fidgeting, readjusting his ice bag as it slipped from his leg. “I’m serious. Don’t worry about it, G. It’s not a big deal. It happens.” 

He hadn’t yelled at Zhenya or called him names, so that was—something. No big deal wasn’t outright rejection, but it also left Zhenya solidly uncertain. Did Sid like men in the same way that Zhenya did? Quietly and under the radar? Or had it been the heat of the moment? Zhenya turned his face fully into the table’s cushions to hide any hint of his expression. Sid didn’t need to know his feelings. 

But Sid was nosy to a fucking fault, and never stopped talking and wouldn’t start now. “Did you—uh—want it to be a big deal?” he asked, looking for all the world like a wax figure for a moment, frozen there with his hand halfway between his leg and his lap. His eyes twitched to Zhenya and then away. 

“No,” Zhenya lied. He moved to give Sid a stern face and winced at his shoulder as he hoisted himself up. Fuck. 

He could tell that Sid absolutely did not believe him. “Okay,” Sid said slowly. He kept looking at Zhenya like maybe staring might get Zhenya to talk. Fat chance. Eventually he seemed to give up and picked up his phone again, tapping away. “If you say so, G.”

Stew came back in shortly after and chastised Zhenya for moving around and pressed him back into the table. “You need to help me help you,” Stew told him. Sid snorted from across the room. If Zhenya were capable, he would have smacked him. “I’m gonna give you some painkillers, okay? Take them. Do your fucking exercises. Don’t ignore this.” 

By the time they left, Zhenya felt thoroughly parented. No one liked to be a little banged up, but it happened, and they played through it. Zhenya wasn’t about to miss a fucking game and sit in the press box and think about his personal life. Not a chance. 

He and Sid walked in unison through the bowels of PPG until they reached the parking deck, silently pacing across the concrete. Sid held the parking deck door open for him like they were on a fucking date and then blocked him from walking through for a moment, hand on Zhenya’s arm. 

“It can mean something, you know,” he said, looking Zhenya straight in the eye. “If you want it to.” They both just kind of stood there for a moment, locked in some staring contest, like whoever looked away first might have to reveal their innermost thoughts. “Listen, G—” Sid started to say, taking a single step closer, but Zhenya spooked. 

“Have good day,” Zhenya said, brushing past Sid’s arm, which fell limply to Sid’s side as he pushed through. Then Zhenya got in his car and revved the engine and sat there for a moment until Sid pulled out of the parking deck. 

He heard Sid’s words all the way home.

///

Anya drove Zhenya to the airport the next day so his car wouldn’t end up stuck there for the next two weeks with the team on the west coast and then the bye week in Miami.

“I was thinking of inviting Sid to come with us to Miami during the week off so we don’t have to miss a month,” Anya said, her voice measured and exploratory. “What would you think about that?” 

“I’m not sure he’ll come,” Zhenya told her. Sid loved nothing more than the uncomfortable cold of winter and would likely be itching for it even more after a week in the California sun. “I don’t feel like sunning himself on the pool deck is his idea of a great time.” 

“Seems like a pretty great time to me,” Anya said. When Zhenya glanced at her she waggled an eyebrow at him suggestively and he barked out a laugh. 

“Oh, it’s like that now?” He couldn’t stop laughing for some reason, even through his nerves. 

“Save it,” Anya chided. “You know very well that he’s attractive enough to be ogled. You’re not off the hook.” They merged from the bridge to the highway. Once they were firmly across, Anya turned to him and asked, “Did you guys ever—is that why he offered to do this?” 

“What? No, I—” Zhenya sputtered. “We definitely never—you know how fucking weird he is. I’ve met like, a single one of his girlfriends in the past decade.” 

“But you wanted to?” she asked, diving right to the heart of it. Zhenya knew he didn’t have to answer. Anya knew him better than he realized most of the time. He looked out the window at the passing guardrails and heard her huff a short laugh. “Well, I suppose you don’t have awful taste.” 

“We can stop, you know,” he offered. “If you want. If my being interested in him makes it—weird.” Zhenya didn’t want to stop, not now that he’d received even the barest scraps of encouragement. But he would do it, if that was what Anya wanted. “I know that’s not what you signed up for. He’s very annoying when you get to know him. I’ll get over it.” 

“We don’t have to stop,” Anya said. They both watched the hills sloping around them for a while until she pulled the car into the airport exit lane. “I never imagined it really—you loving another man.” 

“I wasn’t in love with him,” Zhenya protested. He needed to quash this right now, before Anya let her mind wander too far into these fanciful ideas. He had been, at best, a horny and besotted kid. Sid was nice to look at, he was charming, sure, when he wanted to be. But it hadn’t been anything resembling love. “I was twenty, Anya. I was just an idiot.” 

“Don’t worry,” she said as she idled the car in the parking area where they always gathered for team flights. She patted him on the cheek and let her palm linger there for a while after. “You’re still an idiot.” 

Zhenya could see a few of the guys pulling in and getting out of their cars. Sid’s SUV was across the lot. The flight’s ground crew was bustling around and pulling the stairs out and readying the plane. Just another typical day of his life now, but it didn’t feel that way. 

“Let me know if Sid says he’ll come,” Zhenya told her as he unbuckled himself and pulled his backpack from the backseat. 

“Okay, you baby,” she said, smiling at him fondly. “You could ask him yourself, you know. I hear it’s not so bad.” 

“Trying not to make it weird,” he said. There was always a convenient excuse to say nothing, in his opinion. It was better to let everyone else sort themselves out. He shrugged a shoulder. “Trying to keep things normal. Status quo.” 

“I think we’re somewhere past normal,” Anya said.

///

Sid agreed to come to Miami for the days leading up to the All-Star Game, in which he was scheduled to play. “We’re okay, right?” he asked Zhenya while they were lingering in McCarren waiting to board. They both had hats on and pulled low. Sid was wearing a team branded t-shirt which Zhenya gave him pointed looks about until he threw a hoodie on over it: plain black, inconspicuous. Zhenya tried to be gracious, but he didn’t love to be recognized.

“We okay,” Zhenya parroted. He didn’t need Sid needling him about it. He was trying to keep it cool and hadn’t been kidding when he had told Anya that he had never been in love with Sid. But he knew himself, and he knew that he could easily fall off the cliff if he let himself, especially now that Sid had all but encouraged it. ‘It can mean something if you want it to.’ Christ. “You ready for sunshine? You bring swim trunks?” 

“No, I forgot them at home actually,” Sid answered, completely deadpan about it. He shrugged one thick shoulder, toothy smirk on his face. “Guess it’s swimming naked for me.” 

“Not in front my kid,” Zhenya said. He laughed, because it was easy to laugh. It was easy to be Sid’s friend; he’d been doing it for ten years. He could absolutely separate the Zhenya who had fallen for a teenage Sidney Crosby and the Zhenya who was married now, a family man with a wife and a kid. It might even be kind of funny if they looked back on it in ten more years. Remember that time we had a threesome and you helped us make a baby? Surely plenty of hockey players had done wilder things.

Zhenya called a car to take them from the airport to their condo, and Sid made a bunch of noise about riding in the car on the ferry that took them from Miami proper to the island. By the time they got to the condo, they were both flagging a bit from the jetlag, and Zhenya dumped his suitcases ceremonially just inside the door. 

“Flight okay?” Anya asked them both. She was cooking something—salmon, it smelled like—and as soon as the smell hit him, he was also hit by a loud, high-pitched shout as Nikita came careening around the corner on his little toddler feet. 

He slammed face first into Sid’s legs and grabbed on. “Hey, bud,” Sid said, laughing. He dumped his backpack and reached out to ruffle Nikita’s hair. 

“What about papa, Nikit?” Zhenya said, bending down to Nikita’s level and taking hold of him in one long swoop of his arm. Nikita squealed and laughed and then careened away, back to the couch where Zhenya could hear him flopping onto the cushions. 

“So much energy,” Anya explained, standing in the doorway and scrubbing a hand through her hair. “Thanks you here now, keep him busy. I don’t know what he eat.” 

The four of them set up at their rarely used dining table for dinner shortly thereafter. Anya was still dressing up in Sid’s presence like he was company. She had a summer dress on with big shiny earrings, her hair pulled up in a perfectly manicured knot. He and Sid were both in their traveling clothes and smelled like airplane. Nikita had an unidentified stain on his shirt. 

“You like it here?” Anya asked Sid as they passed the plates around and tucked in to eat. “Ready for nice week? You swim?” 

“I wouldn’t mind a good swim,” Sid said. He nodded his head at Nikita. “I hear this guy’s a pretty good swimmer, eh?” 

Anya smiled, smoothing Nikita’s bangs back from his face so he wouldn’t get sauce on them. “Little fish.” 

It struck Zhenya that Sid was very much a natural at dealing with kids, in a way that even a lot of Zhenya’s other parent friends weren’t. He even let Anya foist Nikita off on him while she cleaned up from dinner and Zhenya went to unpack. Zhenya came back from the bedroom to find him parked on the sectional with the television on, Nikita spread out with his hockey-themed Lego figurines on the coffee table. 

“Who’s that playing goal, eh?” Sid was asking him. Nikita kept babbling at Sid in Russian, interspersing various players’ names. 

“English, Nikit,” Anya reminded him, coming in from the kitchen drying her hands on her dress. She sat down on the couch gingerly, taking care to keep a few inches between her leg and Sid’s. “You tell Uncle Sid who is play? Who plays forward?” 

Nikita slowly explained. He didn’t know much English yet, but Sid didn’t seem too concerned, sitting there and happily listening to toddler rambling like it was his favorite evening activity. Zhenya’s heart felt too big for his chest watching them all in the glow from the television and the hanging lamps. He cleared his throat. “Sid? Where you put suitcase? I’m take to your room.” 

“Oh, I can get it,” Sid said, hoisting himself up from the couch, grabbing his suitcase from the front door, and following Zhenya down the hall. Zhenya took him into the guest room where Anya had laid out a full array of towels and blankets and extra toiletries on the dresser. 

“Better than hotel,” Zhenya joked, sweeping an arm across the expanse of the room. 

Sid dumped his bags on the bed and opened one to pull out some lounge pants. “She really went all out,” he remarked. He picked up and inspected the toiletries. “Organic.” 

“Have to convince you come back,” Zhenya said. He felt suddenly like he very much wanted Sid’s approval and it made him squirm. This was _his_ home anyway, what did it matter if Sid liked it or not. He didn’t live here and Zhenya wouldn’t entertain any fantasy that he ever would. “Five stars.” 

Zhenya went to fuck off back to the living room. Sid grabbed his arm, holding him tight by the elbow. “Geno,” he said. Zhenya looked down at his hand and then back up at his steady gaze. “Thanks for inviting me.” 

The conversation felt heavier than it should have. “It’s no problem.” Zhenya shrugged it off. “We need you. Glad you come, give up snow and cold for us. Maybe it’s worth it and we make it work this week, relax, have fun, don’t have to keep do every month.” As much as part of him wanted to keep trying again and again just to keep Sid in their bed, he knew it was unwise and impractical. They still had a job to do here. Anya’s doctor couldn’t be kept at bay forever. Eventually there would be questions. More tests. Zhenya didn’t want to go through it again. 

“I didn’t put a time limit on my offer,” Sid said, his fingers loosening their grip, rubbing a little at the sensitive inside of Zhenya’s elbow. “Don’t worry about it, okay? I’m here as long as you need me.” Sid dropped Zhenya’s arm then, and they stood there just kind of looking at each other. 

“I let you get settle,” Zhenya decided on, and before Sid could get another word in, Zhenya beat a hasty retreat, afraid of what else he might do or say.

///

Sid spent most of the remains of the evening puttering back and forth from his room to the washroom, showering, laying out his clothes. Zhenya knew that the condo could seem small, and he wanted to give Sid his space, so he holed himself up in the bedroom with his Kindle and tucked into a spy novel that he had read a bit of the week before on the bus.

There was a knock on the door after a while, a few light raps, and Zhenya could hear soft voices from the hall. “Come in,” he said in Russian, and then in English, in case he was in mixed company. He took his glasses off and tucked them into the bedside table. 

It was Sid, sporting pajama pants and pink, freshly scrubbed cheeks. He smelled like Anya’s lemon-scented body wash. God. Zhenya could smell it from across the room. 

“Hey,” Sid said, giving Zhenya a sleepy smile. He kept looking around the room, at what Zhenya wasn’t sure. Their condo wasn’t excessively decorated in any way, just clean lines and the quirks of whatever they had purchased it with several years ago. Zhenya didn’t have much time to remodel. 

Sid came and sat on the edge of the bed. “Anna is putting Nikita to bed,” he said, scrubbing a hand through his hair and mussing it up awkwardly in the back. 

“You guys do tonight? Not too tired?” Zhenya asked, yawning. He still felt a bit sluggish himself from the day of travel. 

“Yeah. We uh—I think we will,” Sid said. Zhenya could admit that he looked pretty cute, sitting there in his flannel pajama bottoms on Zhenya’s bedspread, a small boyish grin on his face. He looked very young, closer to nineteen than he did to his real thirty-one years. “Did you wanna—?”

Zhenya leaned over to grab his glasses and his Kindle. Maybe he could get a few more chapters in, if Sid didn’t need Zhenya here to calm his nerves. But Sid put a hand on his arm as he went to stand. It was warm and shaking a little. Zhenya looked down at where Sid was grasping him. 

“No, I mean—” Sid began to say. He tugged and Zhenya went easily, dropping his ass back to the mattress. “I didn’t mean you should leave.” 

Zhenya swallowed. Sid climbed further onto the bed and put his hand on Zhenya’s knee this time. “You could stay?” Sid said, his voice going high at the end like he wasn’t sure if he wanted it to be a question or a request. 

Zhenya’s heart started beating fast, hammering out of control. He raised his eyebrows a little, frankly kind of surprised. 

“That’s okay, right? You want to?” Sid asked, leaning closer until Zhenya had to cross his eyes to see Sid’s face. Somehow he had thought—well. Perhaps the first time had been an aberration. He wasn’t trying to get his hopes up about getting involved again. Sid hovered there until Zhenya nodded and then Sid kissed him, his palm a heavy weight on Zhenya’s leg, his mouth wet and tasting like toothpaste. 

It felt even more illicit doing this alone than it had with Anya between them, like some weird line had been crossed. It was stupid to do it, maybe, but Zhenya was helpless to say no. 

By the time Anya crept into the room, Sid had a palm firmly up Zhenya’s shirt, tentatively cupping his ribs right over his tattoo. “Busy?” she asked, climbing on the bed behind Sid, settling her ass on Zhenya’s outstretched knees. 

“Hi, Jerry,” Zhenya said to her, smiling dopily when Sid pulled away and rolled to sit next to them. His mouth felt like a bruise. When he glanced aside, Sid was obviously hard in his sleep pants. Zhenya wasn’t sure how he had ever thought that Sid wasn’t into men. 

Anya wasted no time in getting naked, stripping her sleep shorts and tank top off and tossing them in the direction of the walk-in. She climbed atop Zhenya and pressed him down into the pillows. “Thanks for getting him ready for me,” Anya purred in his ear in Russian, biting the lobe roughly as he turned his head aside to blush. “You like it?” 

Zhenya squirmed. If only she knew just how much he liked it. 

“You guys talking about me over there,” Sid asked, amusement clear in his tone. He was grinning and didn’t even seem to care if they were. Had he had a lot of threesomes? Zhenya wondered. Maybe this was a thing he did, a casual letting off of steam. There was certainly plenty of him to go around. 

“Shh,” Anya said to him, scrunching her nose up the way she did at Zhenya sometimes when he was being what Anya thought was petulant and he thought was adorable. He could see the same feeling reflected in her face now, looking at Sid. “Don’t listen.” 

She arranged them both how she liked, sitting up against the plush headboard with their shoulders touching. “Stay,” she directed, and tugged both of their pants off with little struggle until they were both bare to the cool air of the room and almost painfully hard. Zhenya looked aside and eyed Sid up and down and caught his gaze. It felt like they were hostages in a movie, and Anya was playing the role of the sexy undercover villain, which Zhenya didn’t entirely dislike. 

It was kind of freeing to imagine this as roleplay. He would play the part of a guy casual enough to have a threesome with his wife and his good friend. No feelings needed. No mess. 

Sid let out a quick oomph of air when Anya settled herself over his lap. Zhenya knew it intimately: Anya’s pussy settled wet over his dick, no doubt warm and slick the way it always was this time of the month. 

“You ready?” Anya whispered to Sid, so quiet that Zhenya could hardly hear it. 

Sid was still a little squirrely in her presence, clenching and unclenching his stomach as Anya got herself good and comfy in his lap. “Thought we uh—thought you wanted me on top this time?” he asked.

“Yes,” Anya said. She put a finger on Sid’s face and rubbed it down his cheek and popped it into his mouth. “But I like this first, okay?” 

Sid just nodded and let her at it. She rocked back and forth in his lap. He put a palm too tightly against her hip and she pried it away and it landed on Zhenya’s leg, twitching dangerously close to his hard cock. 

“You keep that up too long, I’m gonna,” Sid said. He shut his eyes and turned his face aside. It seemed at first that Anya was going harder, rutting down once, twice. And then she jerked off him, scrambling backward. 

“Somebody is having fun,” Zhenya remarked to her in Russian, teasing her. She seemed lighter than she had before, less on edge. Something about the warm Miami weather always did that to her, but it seemed different now, something about her ease specific. Watching her smile and tug at Sid’s ankle, Zhenya could start to see why. 

“C’mere,” she said. She tugged a fallen pillow from the floor and tossed it under her hips. “Let’s go, c’mon.” Sid climbed over her, his big body and his big thick legs, a wide expanse of pale skin hovering over Anya’s long, tanned frame. 

“You’re bossy just like Geno, eh?” Sid said to her, kissing her neck a few times. He looked back at Zhenya and grinned. “He says the same shit to me every day at the rink. ‘Sid, come skate. Sid, hold my stick.’” He was snickering into Anya’s skin. He thought himself very funny. 

“I hold your _stick_ ,” Zhenya quipped. 

“Yeah?” Sid asked, looking back like he was daring him. “You gonna?” He jerked his head a little and Zhenya came forward without thinking, really. Both Anya and Sid were watching him. He settled against Sid’s side, pulling Anya’s legs one at a time until they were folded against her chest. She kept his gaze, mouth open, her breathing audible and nervous. This was _it_. The big shebang. Zhenya ran a comforting hand down her flank and took Sid in hand, guiding him into Anya until he hit bottom and she groaned deep in her chest. 

Anya cursed to herself in Russian. “Down here,” she said to Zhenya, who lay down next to her, kissing at her hair and her mouth when he could get her to turn her face to him. Sid kept sliding slowly in and out, punctuated by his soft groans. His nose was crinkled up; he was sweaty all along his hairline and it glistened in the dim light of the room. Zhenya put his tongue in Anya’s mouth and closed his eyes and imagined for a second that it was him inside of her. He was glad to be here now, part of the process of making a baby. It wasn’t just what their bodies could do that mattered. 

“Shit,” Sid said. “G can you—” Zhenya watched him brush his fingers over Anya’s clit and the lips surrounding it, smearing shiny slick all over as he hoisted her legs up a little more. Zhenya replaced Sid’s fingers with his own hand, tucking his chin down to watch his fingers working on Anya’s swollen pussy, Sid’s pubic hair matted and wet as he fucked in and out of her at an increasingly frantic pace. 

When Anya came, it was with Zhenya’s hands wrapped in her hair and Sid tucked in on himself, his palms holding her ankles over his shoulders. “God, you feel so good like that,” Sid told her. His eyes crunched up into tight lines and he followed her over in barely more than a few seconds and motioned like he was going to pull out. 

“No, stay,” Anya said, her slim hand on his huge thigh. She rubbed him reassuringly along the hard line of muscle there. “Give it a minute.” 

“Yes, ma’am,” Sid said, laughing softly at her exhausted smile. He looked over at Zhenya in turn, down the length of his body and back up. “Just gonna let that thing go to waste?” 

Zhenya put his hand around his own swollen dick, letting it stand up in his lap. He crooked a challenging eyebrow. “You don’t help?” 

Sid let one of Anya’s legs rest on his arm for a moment, shrugging that shoulder at Zhenya in response. Zhenya might have been irritated at his nonchalance, but Sid’s eyes followed the path of his hand as he touched himself, his gaze curious and making Zhenya run hot all over. 

Zhenya didn’t drag things out, and he couldn’t have. Not with Anya warm next to him, running her nails down his side, her hair tickling his cheek. Not with Sid watching him like he _wanted_ him, like maybe he might like to touch, sometime. He came with his lip stuck firmly between his teeth, and his come got all up his stomach, a spurt of it landing on his chest and matting his chest hair. 

“Fuck,” Sid said, still staring at him with those warm eyes. He put one and then the other of Anya’s legs down, leaving them cradling his hips. “If I hadn’t shot my shit already that definitely would’ve—well.” He scratched bashfully at his hair. “You good?” he asked Anya, hand around the base of his dick, soft in his fingers. “Should I?” 

Anya nodded and let him slip out. A small drip of come slipped out after, and before he could think about it, Zhenya put his hand over it to slide it back in, two of his fingers stuffed in Anya’s sensitive hole, covered in Sid’s come. “Christ,” Anya moaned, turning her face one way and then the other. “I’m sore, Zhenya, please.” 

“Can’t let it sneak out,” Sid remarked, laughing softly. It seemed that in the wake of the comedown, Sid’s reticence had returned somewhat, diving back into his habit of awkward joking to diffuse any serious discussion that might creep in. 

Zhenya was thankful, honestly. He would happily pretend he had no feelings about it other than inoffensive enjoyment. 

But Sid was already standing up. Tugging his pants on. Crossing his arms across his chest. “If you don’t need anything else,” he said, thumbing a hand in the direction of the door. “I’m gonna.” 

Anya wasn’t having any of it. “Sid, no—” she said, getting up fully nude and tugging at his arm. Zhenya had always found him surprisingly hard to move, but for Anya he moved like putty, following her like a child back to bed. Anya looked at Zhenya, conveying some question with her eyes. _Is this okay?_

Zhenya let his silence answer. He wasn’t entirely sure if it was, but he wasn’t cognizant or tough-headed enough to protest. 

Zhenya rose to use the washroom, scrubbing the sticky come from his chest and brushing his teeth until his gums bled. When he came back in, Anya had bullied Sid into the center of the bed, wrapped around him like a long, lazy monkey. She spoke quietly in Sid’s ear, words Zhenya couldn’t catch. Zhenya climbed in tentatively on his usual side, unsure if he should face toward Sid’s body or away. 

When he leaned over Sid’s body to kiss Anya goodnight, Sid was stock still, like a statue. And he didn’t settle when Zhenya tentatively lowered back onto his side, trying not to touch. “If you’re not cool with me staying here I can—I’m sure the guest room is just as nice.” 

“Shh,” Zhenya said. He was too warm with the addition of Sid’s body heat, but he didn’t want to say anything. He leaned forward until his hands brushed Sid’s chest, just the barest connection. He wanted what was between them to feel tangible, maybe. Just for a little while. “Sleep, Sid.”

///

In the morning, Zhenya was alone in bed, the sunlight streaming hot through the blinds. He heard a cruise ship passing by outside and blinked awake, returning to the land of the living. The bed was cool on the other side, like Anya and Sid had been up a long while.

When Zhenya went out into the living room, they were sitting on the balcony with their heads bent low. Sid had his bare feet on the railing. Anya had her hair up in a messy, at-home bun. They looked like old friends. It struck Zhenya that this Anya was so different from the Anya he had seen at dinner: perfectly done up in her suit of armor. His stomach ached and he stood there unmoving, looking at them as if they were a picture in a frame. 

Zhenya knew jealousy, but his feelings of jealousy had morphed into something else. He kept thinking about the night before, Anya smiling at Sid so easy: a real, unrestrained smile, a little crooked, imperfect. The same way she smiled at Zhenya. A smile that meant she loved him. 

Zhenya wondered if maybe something more between them was possible. A real relationship. The three of them and Nikita, a new baby on the way before too long. What had before seemed so unfair to Anya, seemed somewhat tangible now that Anya and Sid were forging their own bonds. But the rational part of him knew that whatever it was between the three of them couldn’t last, regardless of feelings involved. Sid didn’t want children, which he had told Zhenya numerous times. And Zhenya wouldn’t fool himself that it was something he could just force Sid to take back, no matter how much he might want to. 

But he could pretend. For a few days.

Zhenya slid the balcony door open. “Morning,” he said. He stood there behind Anya’s chair. There were only two. “Where’s Nikit?” The house was always suspiciously quiet without him around. Ten years ago, perhaps Zhenya would have preferred it. But he didn’t mind the noise now. Noise meant home, it meant family. He wouldn’t go back. 

“Katya take him and Milanka today,” Anya explained. She passed her coffee to Zhenya and he took a sip and burned his tongue. 

“Bet that’s nice for him,” Sid said. He was looking out at the water still. Something was happening on the opposite shore. “Friend around his own age.” 

“Give me break,” Zhenya joked, tongue stuffed in his cheek. “Then I sleep in.” Maybe they could all go back to bed now, where this seemed simple and purposeful and fun. In bed, they weren’t hockey players, and Anya wasn’t a hockey player’s wife, with all the expectations that came with those things. They were just people. 

“I’m telling Sid we go into Miami Beach today, maybe,” Anya suggested. “If it’s okay with you?” 

Lunch was at a diner in South Beach in an old Airstream that Zhenya had been to once or twice when he was younger and loved. It was greasy American food. The interior reminded him distinctly of nostalgic space-age Soviet advertising. He was eating bacon from the future and he filched some off Sid’s plate, relishing in his terribly addictive smile. Anya smiled and laughed behind her hefty designer sunglasses. 

They went shopping on the Lincoln Promenade, walking in between outdoor patio chairs and lazy tourists. Sid wanted to go in Sunglasses Hut. He stopped to take cell phone pictures of a particularly bizarre statue of a woman lying down with a large bird. 

“I’m glad he came,” Anya said to Zhenya, trailing a bit behind Sid on the sidewalk. “It’s been really nice. I’m glad he’s—I’m glad it’s him, the one helping us out.” 

Zhenya couldn’t help but be honest. “Me too,” he said, feelings he couldn’t help smeared over his face. 

They got drunk that night at a little bar on the beach, sweating in the setting sun. Zhenya got so full on seafood that he had to loosen the drawstring on his pants. 

“You ready go make a baby?” Anya whispered to Sid after Zhenya had paid the bill, loud enough that Zhenya could hear, blatant and flirtatious. It was the most she had joked around about the whole arduous process since she and Zhenya had started it, nearly a year ago now. The first month or so had felt light and easy—laughing about it together, dreaming about the baby. Would it be a boy or a girl? Would they play hockey? Tennis? Maybe they would be a doctor or ride horses or go to the moon.

The conversations had dried up as the tensions had ratcheted higher. But Zhenya saw them unfurling now, the same glint in Anya’s eyes. When Zhenya looked at her and Sid, even he was imagining things that felt far from his reach. Would the baby have Sid’s almond eyes? Would it smile like he did, infectious and open and uncaring? In that moment, Zhenya hoped so. 

On the ferry, they leaned against the railing and stared up at the large expanse of the sky. “Crazy how many stars out here,” Sid said. Zhenya had been eyeing the curve of Sid’s ass in his shorts and turned his face to the sky. “Can’t see these in Pittsburgh.” 

“I think you like warm place,” Anya said to him. She bumped him with her shoulder, taking her sunglasses off her head and plopping them in the middle of Sid’s hat. “Suit you.” 

“Not so bad I guess,” Sid said, and laughed. Zhenya loved his laugh. He looked between Zhenya and Anya. “Good company.” 

They fucked with the windows open that night, letting in the night air. Anya kept moaning, low sounds in her throat that melted into cries. She bit into Zhenya’s shoulder mid-thrust. 

“Careful,” Zhenya warned. He was sure it would leave a mark.

After Sid came, he got on his knees and sucked Zhenya off, laving his fat tongue over the head until Zhenya was gripping chunks of his hair. Anya kept whispering to him, kissing up and down his neck. “You like it? He looks good like that, on his knees.” 

Zhenya could barely stand to keep his eyes open and he scrunched them shut until they had all collapsed into bed in a soundless heap. Zhenya lay there for a while catching his breath and seeing the image of Sid behind his eyelids, wondering if Sid had grown up with the same thoughts and curiosities as Zhenya had. No one sucked cock that well unless they’d done it before. 

Anya got up at some point and turned on and off the washroom light and crawled in between them after, her sweaty body tucked close, which Zhenya normally hated, but currently didn’t mind. It was nice. His heart was slowing, drifting into drunken, happy peaceful sleep.

///

Zhenya had fitful dreams that night. He and Sid had for years taken teammates’ kids to the zoo in Pittsburgh, but that night he dreamed it was him and Sid and Anya there, walking with two small children. Nikita running ahead. A chubby toddler girl in Sid’s arms, dressed in a puffy blue jacket and laughing and laughing.

“Laugh is like dad,” Zhenya said to the girl in his dream. Anya tucked a hand into her hair. 

When Zhenya woke up, he felt a fresh wave of nausea from the hangover and the guilt. He couldn’t stop thinking about it. A family. A family. How had he thought they would get out of this unscathed? He had been terribly naive. 

He tried to put a brave face on, but his thoughts didn’t dissipate. 

Sid came with them to the animal sanctuary and laughed a full belly laugh at Zhenya conversing with the parrots. He carried Nikita on his shoulders through the garden of palms. Anya kept looking at Sid curiously, like she was regarding him and where he fit and each time her face got more and more serene. 

Zhenya could feel the hot spike of emotions in his body and see the growing proof of them on Anya’s face, watching Sid wandering around with their son. He could imagine how it might go. They would talk to Sid about it, and he would let them down _so_ easy, and talk a lot about how much he _loved_ and _appreciated_ them both as friends, but how he didn’t want a family. 

Every memory from their trip felt bittersweet. 

At the pool, Zhenya burnt himself to a crisp by stubbornly laying too long in direct sun and then used it as an excuse to take a long nap in the guest room, ignoring Sid’s prodding hands trying to wake him. “Let him sleep,” he heard Anya say from the door. Zhenya needed time. He needed space. 

It was Sid’s last day in Miami before he had to fly out west for the All-Star Game. The bed smelled like Sid’s deodorant, though it had hardly been used. 

Zhenya drifted, and he stewed.

///

“Is everything alright? You were awfully quiet today,” Anya asked him later as he was scrolling through email in bed.

He flagged a few emails from Genya and deleted some spam. “I’m fine.” 

“You know I can tell when you’re lying,” Anya said. She crossed her arms around her tucked-up knees. “You do that thing with your eye.” 

Zhenya put a hand against his face. It was warm, but otherwise very normal. “What thing?” 

Anya wasn’t one to let things lie. “Is this because I slept with him this afternoon while you were asleep? Is that what you’re upset about?”

“It’s not that, I—it’s nothing, Jerry. I’m just tired,” Zhenya lied. Could he tell her? He wasn’t sure he wanted to. He was already heartbroken enough about his own feelings. He put his phone on the nightstand and lay down, tucking the covers up to his chin. “Can you turn off the light?” 

Anya looked decidedly unimpressed, and she held her hand against the light switch and regarded him with a raised brow. “I’ll turn this off, but only if you talk to me,” she said, and took Zhenya’s silence as affirmation. She curled closer to him, so close that he could make out her features in the dark. Her feet brushed his under the covers.

“I’m waiting,” she said after Zhenya was quiet for a long moment, thinking of what to say. He knew that she would wring it from him eventually. She smiled and nudged at him in the stomach until he laughed. 

“It’s hard to say,” Zhenya said. It was true. He’d been so quiet about it for so long, holding his heart at arm’s length. He knew that once he admitted his feelings, that their short vacation from real life would end. And perhaps that was the scariest part. “You know when you asked me about why Sid offered to do this?” 

“Yes,” Anya said. He could see the faint hints of her furrowed brow. “Was that untrue? I’m not upset if you were involved, Zhenya. It was a long time ago.” 

“We weren’t,” he said and wiped a hand across his face. “I wasn’t lying about that. He wasn’t into guys like that.” 

“I think he’s into guys, Zhenya.” Anya laughed. She pulled Zhenya’s hand from his face and held it between her own. “Or else he’s a _very_ convincing actor.” 

Zhenya blushed, thinking of Sid the night before, wicked on his knees. He was glad for the dark, that she couldn’t see. She nosed her way into his chest, tucking her face in his neck and rolling him onto his back. She climbed on top of him and started nipping lightly at the skin there until he started to squirm. 

“C’mon,” Anya said between kisses. “Spit it out, buddy. I don’t have all night.” Her mouth tickled, and her hands ran up his sides under the fabric of his shirt. He couldn’t help but laugh, his nerves easing. 

“Unhand me,” Zhenya said. He muscled Anya back onto her side and hid his face from her, pressed into her chest. He took a deep breath. In. And out. “I still have feelings, okay?” he said, so quiet that perhaps he could pretend she wouldn’t hear. “I didn’t for a long time, but. I do now.” There. He had said it. 

Anya just put a hand on the back of his head. “Feelings for Sid, I take it?” Zhenya nodded slowly into the soft swell of her breasts. “Oh, Zhenya,” she said, rubbing her hand back and forth through his hair. He felt like a child. He wanted very badly to cry. 

Anya stroked his hair for a while, silent. Zhenya thought perhaps he might fall asleep, but then Anya nudged him and sat up, tucking them both up against the headboard. Zhenya’s eyes were hot. Anya kept him close, huddled together the same way they’d been many nights last spring, as Zhenya soothed her through the endless months of failures. How the tables had turned. 

“I think you should say something to him,” she said. “He might surprise you.” Zhenya shook his head. He had barely been able to tell Anya about it. Telling Sid seemed impossible. They would just soldier through this, and he would keep quiet. Anya would get pregnant. Things would go—back to normal. Or as normal as they could be. Zhenya would move on. 

When Zhenya looked at her face, Anya was frowning, her lips turned down in a deep line. “You know you’re not the only one with feelings,” she said. She looked away for a moment, out the window into the dark. “You think I’m impervious? He’s very—” She trailed off, and Zhenya wanted to laugh mostly so he wouldn’t cry. He knew very well. Sid was many things, and terribly easy to love. 

He put a hand on Anya’s face. It was warm from her blush. “I feel stupid,” she admitted. “I’m too old to be feeling like a teenager, but I look at him playing with Nikit and I think—it would be hard, probably. It would be a lot of work. But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. If he was the father.” 

“Fuck,” Zhenya said, because he really was going to cry now. He angrily scrubbed a tear from his face before it got too far. “We shouldn’t have started this. I never should have thought that we could—”

Anya picked his face up, his hot tears sliding into her fingers. “Zhenya,” she soothed. “Zhenya, shh. Christ, what’s _wrong_?” 

“He doesn’t want kids, Jerry,” Zhenya said. There it was. The moment of truth. It felt like glass coming out of his throat. And he could feel fresh tears welling. God. He really was in way too deep. “What am I supposed to say to him? Can you imagine? We come to him and ask him to be a family with us and he does what? Just lets us down so easy, with his earnest fucking eyes? I couldn’t look at him. I’d have to ask Jim to trade me off the continent.” 

He let Anya hold him for a while, rubbing her hands over his cheeks and his back. He had no idea what to do and knew that he couldn’t take any of it back. “Maybe he’s changed his mind,” Anya said to him, soft against the side of his ear, her voice cracking with her own sadness. “Sometimes you don’t know until you know.” 

“Maybe,” Zhenya said. But he couldn’t convince himself that it was any more than wishful thinking. He had always known, deep down, what he wanted. Children were a big commitment. He wasn’t sure someone could just change their mind. 

“I think you should say something to him,” Anya said again as Zhenya settled. She was still running a soothing hand through his hair, and he could feel himself unwinding, sliding back into the grip of sleep. 

He didn’t know if he could do it. He was a coward, at heart, and even more than that, he was terrified of losing Sid’s friendship, which had been the bedrock of his life for so long that he could barely count. 

And if it went badly, what did they get from it? He and Anya would be back where they started. Firmly in the doldrums at square one. 

“I’ll think about it,” he lied, and lay awake for a while wondering how long he could put it off.

///

Sid left the next morning for San Jose. They all saw him off, Nikita a sleepy lump in Zhenya’s arms. Zhenya stood back a few meters while Anya gave Sid a parting hug, leaning against the wall.

“You guys gonna watch?” Sid asked, zipping up his sweatshirt and patting his pockets for his wallet and keys. 

“We watch,” Anya told him. Zhenya tried to smile but it didn’t reach the edges of his face. 

“Score lots of goal, okay? Skate more fast than McDavid,” Zhenya said, when it was his turn to say goodbye. He hugged Sid with one free arm while Sid rubbed a hand over Nikita’s sleepy head. 

“Fat chance, buddy,” Sid said. He looked at Zhenya’s withdrawn face when he pulled back, and for a moment Zhenya thought Sid might say something to him. It was clear that he’d picked up some on Zhenya’s mood. But he just released Zhenya’s grip and picked up his bag. “Maybe your turn next year, eh?” 

“I turn down,” Zhenya said. This year had been hard, to say the least. He wasn’t happy with himself on or off the ice. Who knew what next year would bring. 

After she had locked the door behind Sid, Anya came to Zhenya and tucked her face into his chest, rubbing her eyes against the soft material of his shirt. Nikita had begun to stir a little, squirming in Zhenya’s hold. He got heavier every day. “Back to bed?” Zhenya asked her. He needed to sleep off this feeling for at least another day, maybe twelve. 

“You go,” Anya said and kissed his cheek, her mouth a long, somber line. “I’ll be there in a bit.”

///

Zhenya’s bad mood followed him home to Pittsburgh, swaddling him like a black cloud at practice and a game against New Jersey, which they lost. Anya was doing a lot of looking expectantly at him, and Zhenya felt her eyes like an X-ray, certain that she could see his darkest, innermost parts.

Sid sidled up to him in the change room a couple of hours before puck drop against Tampa. “Hey,” he said, tentative, like he was feeling Zhenya out. “You feeling okay?” 

“Fine,” Zhenya said. He took his jeans off and tugged his compression shorts on, pointedly ignoring Sid’s lecherous gaze as he bared his ass. 

“Okay,” Sid said, dragging the word out like he absolutely did not believe Zhenya’s bullshit. “Is there a reason you’re giving me the cold shoulder? If I did something fucked I’m sorry, okay? But I can’t read your mind.” 

Zhenya stayed quiet until Sid got the fucking hint. He didn’t want to talk about it. “Can we talk about it later, at least?” Sid whispered. He backed into his stall, accidentally hip checking a naked Horny in the process. 

“Woah, Sidney,” Horny said, jabbing Sid with his can of deodorant. “Feeling cuddly today, bud? Want me on your line?” Some of the guys started snickering about it. Zhenya took the opportunity to slip away unnoticed, off to the steam room where he could sweat for a while and get over it.

The Penguins finally won that night, but Zhenya spent a good portion of it with his hand in excruciating pain after getting heated enough that he let himself get in a fight. Stew gave him a numbing shot during intermission, but even that couldn’t stop him from feeling freshly angry at himself every time he looked at Sid’s face next to his on the bench. Anya could be forgiven for her feelings. But why had he let himself fall in love? Knowing what he knew.

“How’s the hand?” Sid asked him afterward, dropping down next to Zhenya at his stall. It was wrapped up, swaddled in bandages and achingly sore. 

“Hurts,” Zhenya deadpanned, holding it up to Sid’s face like ‘how does it look like it is.’ 

Sid leaned down to untie his skates. “Maybe don’t fight next time, bud,” he said, tone dismissive and clipped, patting Zhenya’s knee. Zhenya shrugged his hand off and stood up. 

“Don’t tell me how to do,” Zhenya said. Sid was being too kind. Zhenya wasn’t in any mood to deal with this.

///

“If you’re planning to feel sorry for yourself all day, can you at least run to the store for me?” Anya called to him from the front hall, taking off her boots and her coat, back from her morning Pilates class. Zhenya was out of the lineup with a fractured hand and hadn’t moved since he’d woken up, still sitting in the breakfast nook nursing a cup of coffee, sliding through depressing international news on his tablet.

“Later,” Zhenya said, not looking up as Anya came into the room and sat down across from him. She kicked his foot softly under the table. 

“Zhenya,” she said. He could feel her eyes on him. She was very stubborn, and he knew without a doubt that she would bore a hole in his face until he looked up. “Look at me.” 

Zhenya did. She looked young. She looked—tired. “If you keep this sulking up, Sid is going to suspect something,” she said. Zhenya felt his body freeze up and Anya grabbed his palm from his mug and held it in her hand. “He isn’t stupid. But I really think you’re making this out to be a bigger problem than it is. I don’t think he’s going to hate you, no matter what his feelings are.”

“Won’t he?” Zhenya wondered, though he knew deep down that he had no clue how Sid would react. And maybe that uncertainty was the worst part. “Easy for you to say when you don’t have to work with him every day. You know he’s going to ask me for a full post-mortem on the subject.”

“Well I’m not sure what other option you think we have,” she said, her voice taking on that sharp quality like she had made up her mind. “I get that you think you can just keep doing this endlessly, but I can’t. I wouldn’t have done it in the first place if I didn’t trust him and love him in my own way. I’m not going to—I can’t just do this endlessly with you holding him at arm’s length. It has to be all of us in this together, or not at all.”

Zhenya was quiet. Letting her words sink deep into his body, feeling fresh with guilt. He’d made a muck of this once already, and it felt awful to think that he was doing it again. He wasn’t sure he would have given himself a second chance, if he were her. 

“You’re going to have to talk to him about it eventually,” Anya said, her face all business, her eyes narrowed. “Sid texted me yesterday and I’m pretty sure he thinks it’s your time of the month.” 

Zhenya snorted. He certainly felt like it.

“I know how much we wanted this. Believe me, I don’t _want_ to stop. I don’t know if I love him, but I—well, you know. It’s not far off,” Anya said, her whole face going pink. She was rarely shy. Zhenya wanted to cry, looking at her terribly earnest face. “But I also don’t want to keep doing this if it’s hurting you. We can figure out some other way.” 

Zhenya looked out the window at the sheets of falling snow, one of the first snows of the new year. What possibilities lay before them? Endless more months of waiting. Would they adopt? Perhaps it would be better to give up, after a while. He watched each of his thoughts of a small child with Anya’s wild hair and Sid’s huge smile fade from view and mourned them, and the fantasy he had created for them. 

“Maybe it would be better if we talked to him together?” Anya suggested. “I am going to make you talk, though. You’re not getting out of it. How about you ask him over when you get a chance. Low key. I’ll make dessert.” 

Zhenya smiled a little. It was nice to know that she had his back through the worst of things. Whatever happened. They would come out together on the other side. “Maybe. Yeah,” he said, feeling a little sorry for himself. This year had been hard enough. He didn’t want more hardship. “Hard to man up when I’m only half man, right?” 

“Zhenya,” Anya said, her brow furrowed. He tried to laugh at himself to assuage her, but it came out empty. “C’mon. You know I don’t think that.” She came over and bullied him farther into his side of the table and wrapped her arms around him, tucking herself into his lap. He did have to laugh a little then. He was sure they made a sorry sight: Anya in her sweats with her rat’s nest of a bun, Zhenya’s sleep-deprived eyes. At least they were a mess together. 

Anya didn’t say much after that, just holding onto him for a while. Eventually she took her hair down from its bun and rose to rinse Zhenya’s empty mug in the sink. She turned back to him before she left the room. 

“It’s gonna suck for both of us,” she said. “If he doesn’t feel the same.” He could see her eyes even from across the room, going dark and wet. “But I think the chance is worth it.” 

“Okay,” Zhenya said and tried to seem sure, and together and strong. “I’ll do it.” But even when he was left alone with his tablet and his shitty news and the silence of the ever-falling snow, the thought didn’t seem any easier.

///

The team went away to Florida for a couple of days and, try as he might to go, Zhenya stayed behind. Putting himself through Ty’s grueling rehab sessions every morning. Getting more X-rays. They lost both games, and Zhenya wasn’t sure how to feel about it. He didn’t want failure for them, his hockey family. But his contributions this season had felt pitiful, and perhaps it felt a little better to imagine that they needed him, that without him they weren’t quite the same.

He met them in Philly on a Sunday, taking a cab to practice straight from the airport. His timing was so down to the wire that the only person left in the locker room was Sid, fully geared-up and talking to Dana about his equipment by the door. 

Zhenya kept his head down and shoved his breakfast bar in his mouth and stripped off his street clothes. 

“You back tomorrow?” Sid asked, like he didn’t already know and hadn’t been following along with Zhenya’s rehab religiously like he always did. He was lingering in the doorway. Dana had fucked off somewhere. Sid was wearing only one skate. 

“See what coach say,” Zhenya said, but he would do everything he could to play, including blatant lying to the doctor about his slightly weak hand. He could deal. 

“Nice to have you back,” Sid said. He shifted his stick from one glove to the other, watching Zhenya warily, like he might bite. “We uh, we missed you out there.” 

‘Did you miss me more than that? Not just the team? You?’ Zhenya wanted to ask but couldn’t. They were alone. But the words felt stuck in his throat. 

“You gonna talk to me?” Sid asked, when Zhenya stayed quiet. “Or are we just gonna—you know I can’t fix whatever I did wrong if you don’t say anything, right?”

Zhenya kept his head down. He could _feel_ Sid looking at him. “Maybe I—” Zhenya started to say, but they were interrupted. 

“Hey Sid?” Dana said, coming around the corner with Sid’s repaired skate in hand. “Got your boot.” Zhenya shook himself from his trance. He’d been staring. It wasn’t as if he could really talk to Sid here. There were ears all over. 

“I’ll see you out there,” Sid said, when he’d pulled his boot on. He raised a gloved hand and gave Zhenya a small smile, tight-lipped. Zhenya tucked that smile away, in case everything soon went to shit.

///

Sid knocked at the door to the training room after the game the next night. The door was open, but he was just hovering there when Zhenya looked up, like someone had told him he couldn’t come in.

“I think the bus is leaving soon. For the plane,” Sid said. Zhenya was stewing, sitting in his track pants and his winter coat, trying to take a single breath that didn’t feel like glass. He hadn’t been able to get his legs under him all game, and maybe he should have cut himself some slack, but the Flyers always got under his fucking skin. He’d swung his stick at someone’s head and, well. It was just his luck. Probably he’d get slapped with a fine. 

He had a missed call from Anya on his phone that he felt guilty about ignoring. He gave Sid a tentative smile. “I come soon,” he said. “Don’t worry.” 

“You seemed pretty out of it all game, dude,” Sid said. He took a single step in and then just kind of stood there. He never knew when to let something go. 

Zhenya shrugged, and then, because he really needed to just get this over with, instead of dragging on endlessly, said, “Maybe you come over my house this week, okay? We talk then.” 

“Come over?” Sid asked, brow furrowed in confusion like Zhenya had just asked him to fly to the moon. He was just leaning there, giving Zhenya all the space in the world but Zhenya still felt like he couldn’t breathe. Would it be awkward like this forever? “Can’t we just talk about this here? I get that you’re mad at me, okay.”

“Come over,” Zhenya said again, more forcefully. He hopped off the makeshift training table and made his way to the door. He put a hand on Sid’s shoulder. “No time now to talk, okay? Don’t want to miss plane, get stuck in Philly.” He left his hand there on Sid’s shoulder for a moment and gave him a companionable squeeze.

///

Sid was coming over for dinner on Friday, but before that there was practice and Anya there with Nikita in her arms, bundled up in his polar bear sweater with the ears on the hood. He looked so fucking cute. Zhenya wanted very badly to cart him around the ice, but he had drills to do, so he settled for waving each time he passed where they were stationed along the glass.

He got caught up in a conversation with Sullivan at some point and when he turned around, Sid was leaning against the bench with his helmet on the ice, chatting away with Anya, Nikita tucked inside one of his arms. His hair was sweaty and stuck to his neck and he was smiling, pink all over from exertion, laughing at something Anya was saying like it was the funniest thing he’d heard all week.

“You’re looking pretty fertile, Sid,” Tanger yapped, from down the bench, loud enough that the whole room could hear. A couple of the guys snickered. 

Zhenya skated over and caught Anya’s eye and waggled a glove in her direction. “Look, Nikit,” he heard her say in Russian. “Who is it? Papa?” Nikita and Sid both turned to look at him, and Zhenya flushed pink under his visor. He was dying inside, watching Sid bouncing his child on his hip like a seasoned father would. When Zhenya got close enough, Anya looked at him over Sid’s head and mouthed ‘sorry.’

“Papa!” Nikita squealed, squirming in Sid’s grasp. Sid passed him into Zhenya’s arms and when he kept squirming, too excited to function, Zhenya put him on his butt on the ice. 

“You like it down there? I’ll leave you! Bye!” He pretended to skate away, gliding backwards while the three of them laughed and Nikita scrobbled against the ice’s glassy surface to stand. It was terrible and wonderful at the same time to watch them, like one last snapshot of the thing he wanted most and couldn’t have. He memorized it, because he was a terrible masochist, and tucked it away.

“I think I’m needed over—” Sid said, when Zhenya skated back to them, thumbing toward where a couple of the new guys were doing hard angle shots with Muzz. Sid loved that kind of shit, but Zhenya knew an escape when he saw one. Zhenya deposited Nikita back in Anya’s arms and did a few more laps because the official part of practice was over and fucked off to the locker room to shower and get dressed. 

On the drive home, Nikita passed out before they had even hit the highway, and Anya pulled her sunglasses down her nose and peered through the rearview at him, laughing softly to herself. “Wore him out from excitement.” 

“He loves hockey,” Zhenya said, like the more he said it the more okay Anya would become with the idea of Nikita playing someday. He knew all about her campaign for him to get into something else: soccer, swimming. Zhenya wasn’t having any of it. His son would be a hockey player. 

“You know,” Anya said, as they coasted through mid-afternoon traffic, “I wasn’t sure when to say something. And maybe it’ll turn out to be nothing, but. I missed my period last week. Took a test. Two lines.” 

“Oh,” Zhenya said. He felt. He felt a lot of things. Relief. Fear. He wasn’t sure how to feel yet. “That’s—are you going to say something? To Sid?” 

Anya kept picking at her cuticles. Zhenya knew it was a nervous tic. He took one hand off the wheel and grabbed her fingers in his to settle her. “I’m not sure if I’m going to tell him yet,” she said. “But I wanted to tell you.” 

Zhenya didn’t answer her with words. He wasn’t even sure what those words would have been. He took her fingers and brought them to his mouth and kissed them, and watched her nervous smile spread wider across her face. 

And maybe it wouldn’t come to pass. The chance was always there. He’d learned long ago not to hope too much. It was easy to become wedded to it and let your life live and die by the ups and downs. Always waiting. But maybe it was real this time: a baby. Maybe this was how they would get through. 

He wanted to hope.

///

The night that Sid came over, Zhenya put on a nice sweater and cologne. He tried to do something about his hair. He felt stupid about it, but even if everything went to shit, he didn’t want to be in sweatpants, crying into his tea for the rest of the night.

He passed Anya in the washroom on his way downstairs. She was futzing with one errant curl in her hair, tucking and untucking it from behind her ear. “You look pretty,” he said, leaning in the doorway. She looked over at him, hand still caught in a tangle of hair. Zhenya gave her a somber smile. 

The doorbell rang while Anya was taking the cake from the oven, so Zhenya hoisted Nikita up from the floor and carried him on his hip to the foyer. Sid had a bottle of wine tucked into his arm and it was raining outside, and he was holding a magazine over his head. When he stepped in the house his shoes squeaked on the tile. 

“You don’t have umbrella?” Zhenya asked. He put Nikita down and let him skitter over and grab on to Sid’s damp pant leg. 

“Short walk from the car to the door,” Sid said. He wiped his hands off on his pants and ruffled Nikita’s hair. “Didn’t think I’d need it.” 

“You need towel?” Zhenya asked. Sid shook his head. He looked Zhenya up and down. 

“Have you worn that before?” he asked, nodding at Zhenya’s sweater, which was soft cashmere and one of Zhenya’s favorites. He had absolutely worn it before. Apparently, Sid had never noticed. “It looks nice.” 

Zhenya flushed. He took the wine from Sid’s hands and led him and Nikita to the kitchen, where Nikita climbed back up into the breakfast nook, scribbling with yellow marker over a coloring book page with little regard to keeping within the lines. Zhenya could admit that his son probably wouldn’t be an artist. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. 

“Very nice, Nikit,” Anya said to him, then she came over to Sid and gave him a perfunctory hug, light and friendly, the kind of hug she gave wives of Zhenya’s teammates who she barely knew. Sid looked stiff in her arms. “Hi Sid,” she said. “Thanks for wine.” 

“Trader Joe’s,” Sid said, with a small smile. “Comes highly recommended.” Zhenya grabbed a few glasses from the cabinet and gave himself a heavy pour. He knew that he probably shouldn’t drink, if he wanted to keep his head. But his nerves won out. 

Zhenya pushed a glass into Sid’s waiting hand and ushered him off to the living room, mostly so he wouldn’t have to look at him for a minute. This was awful. He felt like he was headed for the gallows and looking at Sid’s face wasn’t helping. “Would you settle down?” Anya said to him in Russian, once Sid had gone. “I can smell you sweating from across the room.” 

Zhenya just sighed, dropping his head on Anya’s shoulder. He took a deep breath of her skin, inhaling it into his lungs. She smelled like Zhenya’s body wash, distinctly different than her own. “Did you use my soap?” 

“Perhaps,” she said, dismissive. When he looked at her face, she was blushing. She extracted herself and went to collect Nikita’s things and hoist him up into her arms. They’d fed him a bit earlier, and now it was time for bed. “Go on.” She shooed Zhenya off. “Surely you can talk about something mundane for fifteen minutes.” 

Zhenya would rather make small talk with wolves. But Anya gave him a sharp look before he could protest and he kissed Nikita all over his face and said his goodnights and went, leaving Anya to take her time carting Nikita upstairs. 

Sid was on one end of the couch, sitting there looking around the room at things he’d seen a million times before. Zhenya went to sit down and then migrated to the armchair at the last minute. “You have a sip? It’s pretty good,” Sid said, taking a drink. 

“It’s good,” Zhenya said. He took a long swig, letting it warm his throat. He tried to joke a little, like maybe that would soften the blow. Everyone knew his wine preferences. “For red.” 

Zhenya looked off to the side, out the window at the rain. His drapes needed dusting and he made a mental reminder to put it on the list for the housekeeper. Sid kept on, going through his Rolodex of safe topics. “I think the team is trending up, you know,” he said, the king of bland commentary. “I was talking to Sullivan yesterday and I really think we can pull it together. I know you think we’re having a hard go of it, but—”

“Sid,” Zhenya cut him off, and Sid’s mouth snapped shut. “Don’t want to talk about team, okay? I’m so frustrate right now. My game. I don’t know. We talk later.” He wished that the season were going better, and the team’s exploits were instead a helpful distraction. But things were no good. Not even his impending thousandth point could do much to sway his opinion. 

“Okay,” Sid said. He dragged the word out like he had nothing else to say. Zhenya knew that Sid was well aware that _something_ was going on here. He badly wanted to wait for Anya, but she was taking too long upstairs, and he felt like he might explode. 

“I need talk to you,” Zhenya said. Well that certainly seemed stupid and self-explanatory. 

“Yeah,” Sid said. He sat up a little straighter, cupping his hands together in his lap. “I definitely got that impression from the uh—cold shoulder you’ve been giving me since we came back from the bye week, bud.” 

Zhenya grimaced and didn’t cut in fast enough before Sid continued. “Are you gonna…?” 

“I want talk about everything we do, like. Make baby. And everything.” Zhenya was frustrated just hearing himself say the words, which sounded rudimentary and confusing. Not at all how he wanted them to come out. People needed to learn Russian. 

Sid sighed. “I thought that’s what might be wrong,” he said, and Zhenya watched him scratch the back of his neck. He was red above his collar, and Zhenya didn’t know if it was just from the wine. “You’ve kinda been leaving me hanging.” 

“I don’t mean to,” Zhenya said. He felt bad now. He had only been thinking about himself, really. He hadn’t considered how Sid might feel to be on the receiving end of Zhenya’s silence. “Sid, I—” He got up then, and crossed to where Sid was sitting on the couch. He sat down gingerly, careful to keep an inch or two of space between their bodies. He placed a hand on Sid’s twitching knee and watched Sid’s gaze drop to it. “I have—I have feelings.” 

“Oh,” Sid said, just kind of lingering there with his mouth open, his expression shifting from frustration to surprise. He stared at Zhenya’s face unspeaking and then looked down at Zhenya’s hand again and back up, gaping like a fish. “I—wow. Okay.” 

Zhenya wasn’t exactly sure what reaction he had predicted, but this wasn’t it. Sid was rarely ever silent, and it felt unsettling to be on the receiving end of it. Perhaps even outright anger would have been more satisfying. Then Zhenya could have yelled and stomped around. Instead he was reduced to sitting here, trying to muster some level of patience that he didn’t possess. 

“Sid?” he asked, after the silence had truly done him in. 

“I’m just thinking,” Sid said. He rubbed a hand over his face. Zhenya tapped his foot mindlessly. Where on earth was Anya? She always knew the better thing to say. “That really wasn’t what I thought you were gonna say,” Sid muttered, shaking his head and laughing a little, soft under his breath. “Jesus.” 

“What you think I say?” Zhenya asked. He knew from Anya that Sid suspected his bad mood, but he wanted to hear it from the source. 

“I thought you were going to—” Sid started. He got up and paced a little in front of the table and then sat back down, sprawling out a little, his hands tangling in the wet mess of his hair. “I don’t know! I thought you would tell me we had to stop! I was so convinced I’d fucked up somehow. I had a whole speech prepared, I—you have feelings for me? Really? _That’s_ why you’ve been such a fucking asshole lately?” 

He put a hand on Zhenya’s arm and Zhenya could feel the touch all the way to the bone. “You think so unbelievable?” Zhenya asked, wincing as he tripped over the words. 

Sid looked at him for a moment, hand still on Zhenya’s arm. He looked a little crazed, honestly, a little tipsy from the grocery store wine, but part of Zhenya had never wanted him more. Zhenya liked exactly this Sid, not the perfect picture he had dreamed up as a young man. “No, I—” Sid said. He swallowed and Zhenya watched him lick his lips. “I believe you.” 

Sid went silent for another moment. Zhenya scooted closer to him, testing the waters. He felt small stirrings of hope and had to remind himself that it wasn’t Sid’s feelings that mattered really, but whether he wanted everything: not just Zhenya or Anya, a fanciful romance. But a family, the whole rest of it. “Why didn’t you just say something?” Sid asked. 

“I’m say now,” Zhenya said. 

Sid lobbied him an unimpressed look, like he could tell that Zhenya was bluffing. Which was fair, because he absolutely was. Zhenya folded under his stupid eyes like a house of cards. “I’m scare, okay!” he admitted. He put a hand over his face and spoke into his palm. “I’m so worry when I can’t have baby again. Think I’m terrible husband. Not man. I don’t even mean to tell you, but—you say you help and I think. Why not? We’re friends so long. Anya’s so mad at me and I just want fix, you know? But feelings, I don’t think about. I think I don’t need to worry.” 

“Didn’t think I was boyfriend material, eh?” Sid said, and it actually shocked a laugh from Zhenya’s throat, though it was wet with the start of unshed tears. He always got weepy when he got worked up like this. 

Zhenya blushed a deep, beet red. “You boyfriend material,” he said. “But it’s not just—not just me, you know? I’m have family. And if I let myself have feelings for you, you’re family too for me. I have to think them too. And I know you don’t want.” 

“Don’t want what?” Sid took Zhenya’s hand from his knee and held it between his hands. “A family? When did I say—”

“You say!” Zhenya said. He wasn’t crazy. He was sure that he hadn’t been making this up. “You say so many times. ‘Oh I love so much being uncle, so easy. Free time. Best schedule. Maybe I don’t have kids.’ What I’m supposed to think, Sid? You know how important for me!”

“Yeah, okay,” Sid said. He rubbed Zhenya’s fingers in between his palms, staring at them like they might divine some answer. “That’s fair. I have—definitely said that.” He put one hand under Zhenya’s chin for a moment and then dropped it back to his own lap. Zhenya regarded him. “It doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind, you know. Maybe I wasn’t ever as sure as you, but I—I can’t say it hasn’t crossed my mind. In the past few months.” 

Zhenya was seriously going to cry now. He tucked a sweater sleeve against his cheek and blinked a few times. All his fear was just molting off him like feathers and it made him feel terribly raw. 

“I have feelings too, you know,” Sid said. He brushed his knuckles against Zhenya’s chest, a gentle punch. When Zhenya looked at Sid’s face he had just the slightest quirk of a smile. “I can’t believe you didn’t—did you seriously think I’d just hop into bed, just come on a private family vacation with you? If I didn’t?” 

“I don’t know,” Zhenya said. Perhaps he had wondered a little, but those thoughts had been clouded. “I think—maybe you do for fun, you know? Some people like. Maybe you too.” 

Sid laughed. Zhenya loved the sound of it. “You sure think I’m a lot more exciting than I am, bud,” he said. “Regret to tell you I’m pretty boring. You gonna stick yourself with that?” 

“Maybe,” Zhenya admitted. He sucked his lower lip into his mouth, screwing his face up like it might make him look less embarrassed to admit it so plainly. He wanted to be stuck to Sid forever. “Maybe we keep you. Even boring you. If you like.” 

“Yeah, I—” Sid said. “I would like that.” Sid put his palm on Zhenya’s cheek, stroking a finger under Zhenya’s damp eye. “Anna knows, right? How you feel?” Zhenya nodded into Sid’s hand. 

“She want me to say to you long time ago,” Zhenya admitted. Sid’s hand was very warm, even against his flushed cheek. “But I’m stubborn.”

“You don’t say.” Sid’s fingers roamed Zhenya’s face, brushing up his nose and down the curve of his lip, pushing at the small curl of hair that always licked his forehead. Zhenya felt terribly seen. “What else did she tell you? Any more secrets you’ve been hiding?” 

“Maybe you talk to her, okay? She tell you herself,” Zhenya said. He knew that there were things Anya wanted to share with Sid, but he wouldn’t take that from her, the painful moment of raw intimacy. He wasn’t the messenger between them anymore—they had grown into their own pair. 

“Okay,” Sid said. He put both hands on Zhenya’s neck, one on each side. “I will.” Sid kissed him then, leaning forward on the couch with their mouths pressed together until Zhenya felt he might tilt back and fall into the cushions. He wanted to, a little, the crazy recklessness he had imagined a long time ago, necking in the living room like teenagers. But he didn’t feel like that Zhenya anymore, and he didn’t want Sid to be that Sid. 

Zhenya only wanted them to be each other in the present moment. Grown men. Perhaps just as stupid as they had been then, but ready for—something else. More. Whatever they wanted to make between them. 

“Tell me what you think about,” Zhenya said when Sid pulled back, tucking his chin a little into the neck of his shirt. “What thoughts you have about if we family.” His whole body felt like it was buzzing, anxiety turning into adrenaline. Sid had _thought_ about it, maybe some of the same thoughts that Zhenya had been thinking, the same fantasies about what their life might look like. He wanted to know everything.

///

The cake didn’t go uneaten. Zhenya wrapped it up in tinfoil and put it in the fridge that night. But when he woke up the next morning and padded downstairs, Anya and Sid were sitting at the kitchen table with a slice on a plate between them, poking away at it with two forks.

“It has apples in it,” Sid said, spearing a big chunk with absolutely no fruit. “I think it counts.” He shoved it in his mouth and chewed ungracefully. Anya looked up when Zhenya opened the fridge for the milk. 

“Morning,” she said. “You sleep okay?” 

“Sleep fine,” Zhenya fibbed. He kissed her hair as he shoved his way into the table and dropped a carton of milk unceremoniously on the hardwood. The truth was, he’d slept fitfully, too wired to close his eyes. He’d heard the soft sounds of Sid and Anya talking for a while in the guest room, and at some point, he had felt them both slipping into bed with him, each one of them warm against his front and back. 

He’d woken up sweaty, but alone, and hadn’t been convinced that all of it hadn’t been a terribly vivid dream. 

Zhenya dragged the plate over and speared a few pieces of his own. He took a long swig of milk straight from the carton. They had a game that night against Calgary, less than twelve hours away. And another the following night. Hockey season rested for no man. 

“Hey,” Anya said, when Sid went to get up. She put a hand on his arm, looking up at him. “Sit down. Something to tell you, okay?” Sid pulled his chair back out and sat down and Zhenya pushed the plate back in his direction.

“I’m tell Zhenya already about,” she said, pushing a sugar packet back and forth between her fingers on the table. “But I take test last week. I make appointment with doctor. I’m—” 

“Yeah?” Sid asked. Zhenya could see an easy excitement in Sid’s face, looking at Anya, sitting up eager and alert in his chair. Zhenya wouldn’t have to ask now, to know how Sid felt.

“Don’t get too excite,” Anya said. She tossed the sugar aside and took Sid’s hand in her own. And then she looked over at Zhenya and did the same, rubbing over his knuckles. “Maybe it’s lots more hard work for you. But maybe we lucky.” 

“I think I can handle it,” Sid said. His smile was as wide as his face, an open book. It felt so freeing to look at him, watching his feelings blossom now that he felt he had permission to let them free. “Nothing a little hard work can’t fix, eh.” 

“Yeah,” Anya said. She turned her mouth to the side, scrunching her nose up a little, revealed. “Nervous. A little. Maybe we have to start again.”

“We’ll be ready,” Sid said. He reached over to take Anya’s hand in his, tangling their fingers. Zhenya wasn’t certain that he had ever seen Sid look so sure. “Whatever we have to do, okay? We’re in it. Together. Eye on the prize. Right, G?” He looked to Zhenya for affirmation, and Zhenya found himself smiling, so big it almost hurt his cheeks. Anya’s cheeks were pink, and she turned one against Sid’s arm and kissed him there, part of her face hidden from view. 

“We ready,” Zhenya said, and felt it. Really believed it, for the first time. They were.

fin 


End file.
